ESL startup Forte names David Sear CEO

Sear joins Forte after a two-year stint as a strategic consultant, where he served as interim CEO for a number of pre-IPO semiconductor companies. Only Forte, he said, intrigued him enough to pique his interest in taking the reins full time.

"I was very impressed with quality of investors in the company, very impressed with the staff," Sear said, adding that Forte was moving into a new phase of growth.

Though he has more than 25 years of senior management in the semiconductor industry, Forte is Sear's first posting in EDA. Prior to his consulting work, Sear's work included a stint as president/CEO of Vaishali Semiconductor LLC, Integrated Circuit Systems Inc. and Catalyst Semiconductor. He also served as chief operating officer of Quality Semiconductor (now part of IDT).

Sear replaces Jacob Jacobsson, who has served as president and CEO of Forte since the company was formed through the merger of CynApps Inc. and Chronology Inc. in 2001. Sear said Jacobsson would continue with the company in an as-yet-undefined role.

Sear characterized the decision to transition from Jacobsson as typical of a growing company, which might need a more technical CEO in the early stages, but transition to someone with a different skill set when gearing up for more intense product development and market penetration.

Sear said he would be looking at the entire company, reevaluating the way Forte goes to market and how the company's technology, particularly its flagship Cynthesizer behavioral synthesis tool, solves customer problems, which he argued is the key to adoption.

"It has to solve customer problems," Sear said. "You don't want to deploy this as some academic tool that some university professor says this is the way to go."