Keynote Speaker

~ 12:30 pm ~
Luncheon Keynote Address

 IS THAT AN FPGA IN YOUR EMBEDDED SYSTEM
OR AN EMBEDDED SYSTEM IN MY FPGA?
 Presented by Vincent 'Vin' Ratford, Senior Vice President -
Worldwide Marketing, Xilinx 

The future of processing abounds in new possibilities and new challenges to overcome as hardware programmability steps further into the mainstream of real-time embedded computing development. A platform approach by hardware vendors is certainly helping to bring hardware programmability into the forefront so that embedded systems can take advantage of the massive compute power afforded by running code in hardware. However, understanding the value of hardware programmability, and more importantly how to tap into that value, is key if developers are to unlock its real potential. Vin Ratford of Xilinx will address the economic value that hardware programmability brings to the embedded computing world, and the design methodologies and open standards that are helping to foster a healthy ecosystem for bringing programmable logic into the mainstream of real-time processing solutions.

About the Speaker:
Vin Ratford is senior vice president of worldwide marketing, with responsibility for enabling sales to drive company revenue and profitability for Xilinx flagship programmable platforms, including silicon, design tools, methodologies, IP, boards and enabling technologies.

Mr. Ratford joined Xilinx in 2006 when the company acquired Accelchip, where he served as president and chief executive officer. He became vice president of marketing, business development and silicon architecture for the processing solutions group (PSG) at Xilinx in 2006.  In 2007, Mr. Ratford was promoted to lead the entire PSG organization, as vice president and general manager.  In 2008, he assumed an expanded role as vice president and general manager of the solutions development group (SDG), with responsibility for development and delivery of all Xilinx design tools, methodologies, IP, and hardware platforms.

Before AccelChip, Mr. Ratford was vice president of marketing and sales at Virage Logic and chief operating officer for the embedded software division of Mentor Graphics. He has held positions in sales, marketing and development at Mentor Graphics, Teradyne, Data General Corp and Raytheon Corp.

Mr. Ratford holds a BSEE from Northeastern University.