Engineering Team

Founded by Curtis Leifso, Forsetic's team has over 40 years of combined design experience in a wide range of segments of the wireless communications industry. Drawing from industry knowledge acquired at Infineon, Nortel's microwave radio group and Research in Motion, our lead designers worked together for 7 years developing novel integrated transceivers for various standards including CDMA, GSM, TDMA, Bluetooth and 802.11a,b,g,n client and access points resulting in 15 US and Canadian patents and numerous academic and journal publications.

This experience cultivated a unique overlap of skill sets that balances academic interests and pursuit of innovative designs with the constraints faced by today's silicon vendors with respect to time to market, cost and performance demands. Having spent the bulk of our careers working in venture capital funded startups, we've developed a solid design flow that emphasizes tailoring the system design to the capabilities of each individual fab with a focus on manufacturability and testability.

In the eleven years our design leads have worked together, we have never missed a scheduled tapeout date. While many unscheduled surprises have undoubtedly come up in every project, this record is a product of each designers dedication to the project's success and willingness to adapt to each challenge regardless of the time commitment needed to make it happen.

Engagement Model

The typical engagement model that attempts to exhaustively define design requirements up front do not yield an optimal product. We alternatively favor a transparent model whereby we work with a team during all stages of design from specification through to product as part of your team. This is more conducive to the reality that design reiteration is to be expected as needs change and marketing feedback adapts to customer needs.

A typical engagement with us involves working with you at the outset to define your product specifications. During this stage we conduct a short feasibility exercise to try some circuit ideas out and arrive at a system architecture that exploits the capabilities of the fab or aids in selection of an appropriate fab. This most always results in feedback to you for product features not contemplated that further differentiate your product.

Once a system specification is in place, it is adhered to but considered a living document. Better design options may be discovered, alternative DFT requirements may be imposed or it may be discovered in exercising design tradeoffs that a key spec can be improved upon with minimal incremental effort. This information and alternatives available are continuously fed back to the team to ensure convergence on the best product possible.