Mar Hershenson

Mar Hershenson VP Product Development, Custom Design Business Unit, Magma Design Automation, Inc.

Mar Hershenson, Vice President, Product Development, Custom Design Business Unit, Magma Design Automation, Inc. (San Jose, Calif.)

A conversation with EE Times
EE Times: What is the greatest accomplishment, pride in your career?

Mar Hershenson: My greatest pride is not having given up after failing on my first start-up. I am fortunate to be in Silicon Valley where entrepreneurs can learn from mistakes and try again.

EE Times: You are what we call a "Woman of Vision." Can you describe the "vision" that has motivated your professional decisions and choices? Are you still implementing it or have you changed direction?

Dr. Hershenson: My vision has been "to change the way we do analog design." Analog design is still more of an art than a science. That is, we have been using basically the same design flow for the last 30 years. I have some background in both analog design and optimization so marrying the two just seemed the natural thing to do. I have been working on this for almost 10 years now. The main vision remains, although, of course, there have been many paths to achieving that vision and I continue to discover new ones almost every day!

EE Times: Would you say that the visibility of women in technological fields has been improving, albeit slowly?

Dr. Hershenson: Of course, it is improving — just this year we have five women Nobel Laureates! Unfortunately, the past is very slow. The EDA industry is still dominated by men; in the top four EDA companies, there is only one woman in the top executive team, not counting HR. That's still a scary statistic for us!

EE Times: What should be done to encourage more women to become masters of technology and science and take on greater roles in tech in general?

Dr. Hershenson: Unfortunately, there aren't that many women graduating with a CS or EE graduate degree. This is very different in other fields, such as law or medicine. So, we don't have a large pool of women among the new graduates. We lose girls much earlier. The encouragement has to start at home with our daughters. The same way we teach them to read, we need to teach them to fix broken appliances, to build structures, to solve math problems. As an anecdote, I can tell you that just this past weekend I was at a Stanford Math Circle weekly event for high school, middle school and elementary school kids. There were about 35 kids, only two girls. The amazing thing is that the team with the girls did the best, so it is not a matter of whether girls can do it. It is a matter of encouraging them to do it.

Hershenson's biography
Mar Hershenson joined Magma through the acquisition of Sabio Labs, where she was the CEO and a co-founder. Sabio Labs offered an equation-based design environment for mixed-signal ICs.

Prior to Sabio Labs, she was CTO and co-founder of Barcelona Design, where she commercialized her graduate research in the application of convex optimization to analog circuit design. She also worked at leading Silicon Valley companies such as Linear Technology Corporation and Apple Computer.

Dr. Hershenson has been awarded eight patents and has several other patents pending. She is also a Consulting Professor at Stanford University, teaching analog circuit design courses. In 2002, she received the prestigious award TR100 Young Investigator from MIT. She served on the executive committee at ICAAD in 2007 and 2008.

Dr. Mar Hershenson graduated with honors with a B.S. in electrical engineering from the Universidad Pontificia de Comillas in Madrid, Spain, and received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University.