About

Chip Stearns was named president & CEO of Stream Processors, Inc. (SPI) in December 2004. He brings more than 20 years of executive and management experience, technology vision and business development to the company. As CEO, Mr. Stearns leads SPI’s efforts to create new business opportunities.

Prior to joining SPI, Mr. Stearns led networking and wireless technology programs at Hellosoft, Inc. Before that he was CEO of picoTurbo Inc., and prior to that CEO of Mediashower, Inc. He also has held key management positions at S3 Inc., Vertex Semiconductor and LSI Logic.

Mr. Stearns holds 12 technology patents, and has received numerous industry awards for technological innovation. He holds a master’s degree of science in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Bill Dally is the chairman and chief scientist of Stream Processors Inc. (SPI), which he co-founded in 2004.

Dr. Dally is also professor of engineering and chairman of the Computer Science Department at Stanford University where he has spearheaded efforts to develop system and network technology used in most large parallel computers today. Prior to Stanford he was a professor at MIT for 11 years, where his group built the J-Machine and M-Machine parallel computers that pioneered programming models and low overhead synchronization and communication mechanisms. At Stanford he led the Imagine project, which introduced the concepts of stream processing and contributed to the T3D, T3E, and BlackWidow supercomputers at Cray. He was also a co-founder and CTO of Velio Communications, a high-speed interconnect and switch fabric company.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the ACM, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received numerous honors including the Seymour Cray Award and the Maurice Wilkes award. He has published over 200 papers and holds over 50 issued patents.

Dr. Dally has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford and a doctorate in computer science from Caltech.

Jeff Cashen is vice president of worldwide sales for Stream Processors Inc. (SPI) responsible for developing and executing the customer strategy. 

Before joining SPI, Mr. Cashen was vice president of worldwide sales for Ubicom, Inc., a privately held semiconductor company focused on solutions for the digital home.   Before that, he was general manager of the switching and network processor business unit at AMCC.  Prior to its acquisition by AMCC, he was vice president of worldwide sales for MMC Networks. Mr. Cashen started his career with Texas Instruments where he spent over 16 years in various sales and sales management positions.

Mr. Cashen holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Penn State University.  

Tim Southgate, is vice president of software engineering for Stream Processors Inc. (SPI), directing the development of all design tools and application software for the company.

Before joining SPI, Mr. Southgate held executive positions at Altera Corp., where he led all worldwide corporate marketing activities and played an integral role in establishing the company as the leader in programmable logic devices. During his 20 years with the company he managed several of Altera’s major product launches, and was also directly involved in software development.

Mr. Southgate holds a masters of business administration from Santa Clara University and a bachelors in electrical engineering from the University of Southampton, England.

Paul Filanowski is the vice president of hardware engineering for Stream Processors Inc. (SPI), where he leads all silicon and systems development.

Mr. Filanowski brings more than 20 years of semiconductor product development experience to SPI. Prior to joining SPI, he was the vice president of engineering at WISchip, a developer of audio and video encoder and decoder products. Before that he was director of engineering at National Semiconductor Corp., where he led many diverse product programs.

Throughout his career, Filanowski has managed systems and software development teams and multiple ASIC design centers around the world. Earlier in his career, he developed ASIC libraries and CAD tools.  Filanowski holds a bachelor’s Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Bengt Christensson is vice president of business development for SPI, responsible for market strategy, product launches and developing the company's business direction.

Before joining SPI, Mr. Christensson held executive positions with Axis Communications, where he helped chart its course from early startup to a public world-leading video surveillance company. During his 18 years with Axis he was responsible for product development and strategic direction holding positions of CTO and VP of Product Marketing.

Christensson holds a master’s degree of science in electrical engineering from the University of Lund, Sweden, and has pursued post-graduate studies in computer science.

Raghu Rao serves as the general manager of the solutions group as well as managing director of SPI Software Technologies, Bangalore, India – a subsidiary unit of SPI. He is responsible for development of software and systems for business-focused solutions and their deployment into customer production. Dr. Rao has focused his career on the development of software and algorithms for digital signal processors (DSPs), architecting SOCs for market-specific solutions and enabling business with large volume customers.

Prior to joining SPI in 2004, he has held key positions at Cirrus Logic including director of audio/video systems marketing, director of DSP engineering and chairman of Cirrus’ division in India. Previously, he was project manager of the DSP group at Crystal Semiconductor, Austin, TX.

Gary Gemoll has served as Stream Processors Inc.’s chief financial officer since 2004.

He also heads Gemoll & Associates, a consulting firm focused on providing outsourced, fractional CFO services to venture-backed startups in the fabless semiconductor and software industries. Prior to founding Gemoll & Associates, he was the director of consulting and valuation services of Berger/Lewis Accountancy Corp. Earlier in his career he served as vice president of finance and operations for NetObjects.

Gemoll holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration, accounting and economics from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s degree in business administration from Northern Illinois University.