David Wang Joins Synaptics: Is Touch the New Innovation Frontier?

Recently, we ran the story on Anand Mandapati and David Wang leaving AMD, having worked together on numerous silicon designs spanning from their days at ArtX, ATI Technologies and ultimately Advanced Micro Devices.

Given their history together (joined ArtX on the same day, resigned from AMD on the same day), we wondered are the two talented engineers going to reappear together or move in their own ways. While Anand is taking a long-deserved holiday/sabbatical, we received news that David decided to join Synaptics, which is one of several companies that continuously court AMD’s talent pool.

Now, we received word that David Wang joined Synaptics in a role of Senior Vice President, reporting to the CEO. Just like at AMD, David’s role is one of paramount importance, since he will be “responsible for silicon development of Synaptics products.” Given his previous role as a development lead for all AMD/ATI products (APU, CPU, GPU, Console processors), there’s no doubt that Synaptics is gaining an invaluable employee.

This should be of no surprise, as the current President and CEO of Synaptics is no other than Rick Bergman, senior engineering executive at S3, ATI Technologies and AMD. We reported about Rick abruptly leaving AMD and then resurfacing at Synaptics, which is what happened with Godfrey Cheng (senior marketing exec) as well.

Given the level of enthusiasm that we’re seeing from engineers we talk to at Synaptics and N-Trig, it looks like the late 1990s are happening all over again, with the focus of development being human machine interface e.g. touch, instead of graphics. There’s no doubt that solving the Human Machine Interface dilemma will be the one of the most important computing task ahead for researchers and companies alike, as we shift away from keyboards and mice.

Original Author: Theo Valich

This news article is part of our extensive Archive on tech news that have been happening in the past 10 years. For up to date stuff we would recommend a visit to our PC News section on the frontpage.