SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Velogix Inc., a private programmable device company, announced today that Vivek Pendharkar has been named president and CEO. Pendharkar brings 24 years of semiconductor engineering and general management experience to Velogix with a demonstrated track record of building organizations and successfully delivering complex chips to the market.

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Pendharkar joins Velogix from Xilinx, Inc., where he was a senior executive in the Advanced Products Group and responsible for the company's 65nm program. Prior to joining Xilinx, Pendharkar was interim CEO for Sierra Monolithics, Inc, a WIMAX broadband wireless company. Previously, he held the post of VP/GM of the Network Search Engine Business Unit of Cypress Semiconductor, where he helped grow the revenue ten-fold over a period of 4 years. Pendharkar joined Cypress through the acquisition of Lara Networks, where he was VP of engineering.

Pendharkar will also join the company's board of directors which includes Jack Carsten of Horizon Ventures, Steve Krausz of U.S. Venture Partners, Mark Stevens of Sequoia Capital, company co-founder Ashok Vittal, and Erik Cleage, chairman of the board.

"We are excited to have Vivek as our new CEO. His impressive credentials at both start ups and larger companies provide a diverse range of engineering and management experience to Velogix at this important stage of the company's evolution," said Erik Cleage, Velogix's chairman.

"As silicon technology costs continue to rise, the FPGA business exhibits exceptional growth opportunities," said Pendharkar. "I am excited to be able to lead an ambitious young company forward in important new directions within the FPGA market."

Pendharkar began his career at National Semiconductor in microprocessors and then worked at Hewlett Packard where he spent 13 years in various engineering and management roles. Following HP, he spent two years at Intel and held the position of director of engineering in the Itanium program. He earned his BSEE degree in 1980 from Birla Institute of Technology in India and his MSEE degree from Virginia Tech in 1982. He is also a graduate of the Stanford Executive Program.

Velogix was founded in October 2002 by Ashok Vittal and Hare K. Verma and is developing a family of integrated high-performance programmable products.

CONTACT: Warren Miller, Senior Director of Marketing of Velogix Inc.,
+1-408-850-2800, ext. 108

Web site: http://www.velogix.com/