Fabless, From Startup to Beyond IPO

Dr. Curtis Ling is the 2023 ECE Merit Alumni Award winner. 

The path of any successful technology company is one of interplay among entrepreneurship, key innovations, commerce and society.  This talk presents one such story of MaxLinear, a fabless semiconductor startup developing communication systems on silicon, founded in 2003 and becoming publicly listed in 2010.  From a technology perspective, this is a tale of how the chip industry successfully integrated high performance communication systems in mass production CMOS processes in a period of 25 years, effectively bringing Moore’s Law into contact with antennas and photonics.  More broadly, this achievement was entwined with the upheaval and explosive growth in wireless and datacenter infrastructure markets, during a period when the fabless semiconductor industry grew from little-noticed to strategically important, and indeed the focus of national attention.  In the telling, I will share my own perspectives on what has led us to this moment, what may lie ahead; and look forward to a lively discussion to follow.

Bio

Curtis Ling, Ph.D. is a co-founder of MaxLinear and has served as Chief Technical Officer since April 2006. From March 2004 to July 2006, Dr. Ling served as Chief Financial Officer, and from September 2003 to March 2004, as a co-founder, he consulted for MaxLinear. From July 1999 to July 2003, Dr. Ling served as a principal engineer at Silicon Wave, Inc. From August 1993 to May 1999, Dr. Ling served as a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Dr. Ling received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.