EETimes.com
May 1 2010

Profile in Design: Yervant Zorian
Indefatigable promoter of SoC design elegance

Nicolas Mokhoff
EE Times (05/01/2010 12:01 PM EDT)

SAN JOSE, Calif. ‘ It’s not often you run into a renaissance man in
the electronics industry. But when you strike up a conversation with
one of them you instantly know you are in the presence of passionate
people who care more about the whole industry than the sum of their
personal career.
Three "captains of industry" come to mind instantly: Aart de Geus,
founder, CEO and chairman of Synopsys; Pasquale Pistorio, honorary
chairman of STMicroelectronics; and Walden Rhines, Chairman and CEO of
Mentor Graphics .

These men have excelled with their personal qualities in their
individual milieus, while Yervant Zorian, vice president and chief
scientist at Virage Logic, has piloted almost single-handedly the
quest for making intellectual property design blocks smart, more
sophisticated, easier to use in system designs while always adding
value to their cost.

Zorian is a one-man show of getting the job done: whether piloting
another test conference workshop or architecting management tracks at
the upcoming 2010 Design Automation Conference, Zorian is
indefatigably plowing ahead daily to bring the message across to
designers that it matters not what they design but how.

He joining Virage Logic in 2000 having prior served as a Distinguished
Member of the Technical Staff at Lucent Technologies, Bell
Laboratories and Chief Technical Advisor to LogicVision.

As the Vice President of the IEEE Computer Society for Conferences and
Tutorials and Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of IEEE Design & Test of
Computers, Zorian constantly pushes the envelope to bring about a
discipline of marrying test and design. He founded and the IEEE 1500
standardization working group for embedded core test.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the recipient of the 2005 IEEE Industrial
Pioneer Award . He graduatied with an MSc degree from the University
of Southern California and received a Ph.D. from McGill University. He
has also received an honorary doctor of the National Academy of
Sciences of Armenia.

Of Armenian descent, Zorian is actively engaged in the Armenian
Diaspora and travels often to Virage Logic’s design center in Yerevan,
capital of Armenia, where he oversees the research and development of
some 120 design engineers who contribute heavily to the company’s
commercial products such as the Star Memory System, an open memory
interface that enables gives SoC designers testing solutions within
embedded memories.

His work outside Virage includes being a member of the general
directorate of the Armenian General Benevolent Union, which promotes
the Armenian heritage.

Zorian sat down this week with EE Times at the Embedded Systems
Conference to discuss the industry, Virage Logic and its Armenian
connection, as well as offer his thoughts about dissemination of
technical information to a global chip design community.

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