Ken McElvain
Co-founder, Chief Technical Officer, Vice President, Director

Ken McElvain is a co-founder of Synplicity, which he started with Alisa Yaffa in 1994. Mr. McElvain is responsible for new product strategy, developing innovative technologies and algorithms, and contributing to key development projects.

Mr. McElvain is the inventor and chief developer of many of the company’s successful products and technologies, including the company's flagship product, Synplify, used by thousands of engineers worldwide to design programmable logic. He is also a key architect for Synplicity’s other products including ASIC synthesis and physical synthesis, verification and physical implementation products.

Prior to starting Synplicity, Mr. McElvain worked as the principal architect of the AutoLogic ASIC synthesis tool at Mentor Graphics Corporation, which he began developing at Silicon Compilers, Inc. before it was acquired by Mentor Graphics. Before Silicon Compilers, Mr. McElvain worked as a CPU designer at Hewlett-Packard Company. His technical accomplishments over his career include: HDL synthesis, technology mapping and placement, physical synthesis, static timing verification, sequential ATPG, mixed switch and gate level simulation, early cycle-based simulation, extension languages and CPU design. Mr. McElvain holds more than 25 patents.

In October 2003, EE Times named Mr. McElvain one of 13 people who are influencing the course of development technology and taking it into realms that exceed the bounds set by the inventors of the transistor more than 50 years ago.

Mr. McElvain holds a BA in Mathematics and a BS in Computer Science from Washington State University.