SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 4, 2020 – Semiconductor startup Tachyum Inc. announced that it has retained Stephen Dilbeck full time to serve as the company’s Senior Director, System on Chip, to complete physical design through tape-out of Tachyum’s Prodigy chip. Dilbeck first began working with the company as a contractor in 2019 and became a full-time employee in January.

In this position, Dilbeck will be responsible for customer owned tooling (COT) physical design and SoC of the company’s data processing chip by working with engineers to achieve timing, area, performance and power goals of the company’s Prodigy Universal Processor Chip – the smallest and fastest general purpose, 64-core processor developed to date, requiring 10x less processor power, and reducing processor cost by 3x. Dilbeck will be a key asset in helping Prodigy replace the majority of existing chips provisioned in hyperscale data centers, offering significant improvements in performance, energy consumption, server utilization and space requirements.

“Having been with Tachyum for a while, it is abundantly clear that they are not only developing a revolutionary product but a revolutionary approach to the semiconductor market as a whole,” said Dilbeck. “I am looking forward to working full time with the engineers at Tachyum to ensure that their task remains on track and that they are able to achieve their goals of providing unprecedented performance, power efficiency and cost savings to the industry.”

Dilbeck comes to Tachyum after five years of working at Wave Inc. as that company’s Senior Director of SOC Design. There, he managed and defined the necessary workflows and methodologies needed to increase productivity, reduce risk, and meet aggressive development schedules of their ultra-high frequency product. Wave AI Data Flow Processing Unit, whose architecture was invented by Dr. Danilak as a Wave contractor, achieved 10GHz at 16nm process. Prior to Wave, he worked as the Principal Engineer/Director of Physical Design and Circuit Design tools at Skyera Inc. Previous experience includes design leadership positions at Sigma Designs, SandForce, RMI Corporation and PMC-Sierra/SwitchOn. Dilbeck received his engineering education at the University of California, Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

“Steve and I have a shared history of working together at Skyera and SandForce, both which I was founded, and I am glad to see that he has once again joined me full time at Tachyum,” said Dr. Radoslav Danilak, Tachyum founder and CEO. “Stephen has a brilliant mind and an innovative approach to solving problems that sometimes hinder others. He led the tape-out of SandForce’s flash storage processor chip. His deep knowledge and success in working with silicon makes him a valuable asset to our team. I look forward to his contributions as we continue our forward progress in delivering Prodigy to market.”

Tachyum’s Prodigy will directly enable a 32-Tensor Exaflop supercomputer and allow the building of machines more powerful than the human brain by 2021, years ahead of industry expectations. Prodigy reduces data center TCO (annual total cost of ownership) by 4x, through its disruptive processor architecture and a smart compiler that has made many parts of the hardware found in typical processors redundant. Fewer transistors, fewer and shorter wires, due to a smaller, simpler core, translates into much greater speed and power efficiency for the Prodigy processor.