Management:

Edgar Masri - CEO and President

Edgar Masri joined Qualtre in 2008.  Prior to Qualtré, Edgar was President and CEO of 3Com Corporation,  a global data networking company.  At 3Com he led the acquisition of H3C, the joint venture between 3Com and Huawei.  In 2000, Edgar joined Matrix Partners, a leading venture capital firm where he led the investments in and served on the boards of numerous semiconductor and telecommunication equipment startups.  Edgar has also held various engineering and management positions at Sydis and ROLM Corporation (now part of Siemens).  Edgar holds a Diplome d'Ingenieur from Ecole Centrale de Paris, a MS degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California Berkeley, and a MBA with distinction (Arjay MIller Scholar) from Stanford University.

Farrokh Ayazi, PhD. - CTO and Co-founder

Farrokh Ayazi is Qualtré's co-founder and CTO, as well as an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  Farrokh received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the  University of Tehran, Iran, in 1994, and the M.S. and the Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1997 and 2000, respectively. He joined the faculty of Georgia Tech in December 1999.  Farrokh is a 2004 recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the 2004 Richard M. Bass Outstanding Teacher Award (determined by the vote of the ECE senior class), and the Georgia Tech College of Engineering Cutting Edge Research Award for 2001-2002.

Larry Starr - VP Engineering

Larry Starr has been Qualtré's Vice President of Engineering since early 2009.  Larry most recently served as Director of Engineering and Design Center Site Manager at Marvell Semiconductor in Colorado Springs.  Larry was previously at Intel Corporation and Ford Microelectronics in various engineering and management positions.  Larry began his career at National Semiconductor in Santa Clara, CA.  Larry is a past chairman and executive steering committee member of the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) as well as the CICC representative to the Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS).  He also has been a guest editor of the Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC).  Larry received his BS degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati. 

Rich Mannherz - VP Marketing and Product Management

Rich Mannherz has been the Vice President of Marketing and Product Management since September 2009.  Prior to joining Qualtré, he served as a Product Line Manager in the Micromachined Product Division of Analog Devices.  During his employ in the MEMS group of Analog Devices, he held several marketing and product management roles in the inertial product group, serving both the automotive and consumer market segments.  During his twenty-five year career in the semiconductor industry, Rich has also held sales, marketing and management positions at Intel and LSI Logic.  He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering, graduating from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Craig Core - VP Operations

Craig joins Qualtré with over 20 years of manufacturing experience.  He has run the MEMs Wafer Fab Organization for Analog Devices, Inc. with responsibility for both Production and Wafer Level Process Development activities.  He has been involved in MEMs Development and Manufacturing for 15 years, with experiences ranging from Inertial MEMs start-up organizations to volume manufacturing.  Most recently, Craig served as Evergreen Solar's Plant Manager bringing the solar panel facility online from ground-breaking through to full production.

Advisory Board