Engineer, inventor, founder
He spent forty years putting video, networks and signal processing onto silicon. Then he walked away from it to build a cancer test a person could run at home.
Career
A run through the places where communications silicon actually got built, ending in a company of his own in a different field.
2016 to present
Founder and CEO
He left semiconductors for oncology. The company spent nearly a decade in stealth, without so much as a landing page, getting the assay to work.
1996 to 2016
Technical Director to Senior Vice President of Engineering, Broadcom Fellow
He was on the team that shipped the first gigabit Ethernet transceiver to reach the market, and the company named him its number one patent holder in 2005 and 2006. He left as Fellow and Chief Scientist of Central Engineering.
1991 to 1996
Co-Founder and Vice President of Technology
A custom silicon design house, and his first turn as a founder.
1982 to 1991
Member, then Distinguished Member of Technical Staff
Visual Communications Research, and VLSI Systems Research. Named a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff in 1988.
1978 to 1982
Graduate researcher, University of Michigan
Still a doctoral student, he built the hardware and software behind biomedical experiments that flew on the Shuttle.
Record
He is named as an inventor on more than 95 issued US patents, and has published about 50 papers. The work runs through gigabit networking, signal processing, drug delivery, and water.
Papers and patents on ResearchGate
Recognition
Three of these came from committees of his peers. The fourth came from the judges and from the room.
Member, elected 2016
For contributions to development of integrated circuits for video, communications, and digital signal processing.
Life Fellow. Elected for his work on high-performance digital signal processors.
ECE Impact Award, 2024. ECE Alumni Merit Award, 2008.
The highest recognition granted by Electrical and Computer Engineering to its alumni.
Judges' Choice and People's Choice.
Current work
A rapid, exosome-based liquid biopsy read from a fingerstick, on a cartridge built like the COVID-19 rapid tests everyone now recognizes.
He lost a sister and his father to cancer. Another sister survived it twice, both times because it was found early. That is the whole argument for screening, and he had it at home before he had it on a bench.
A $50 cartridge, run at home often enough to catch a cancer as it starts. He set that target on the company's first day and calls it nearly impossible.
I had the dream job at what is now a near trillion-dollar company and I quit to follow this passion.
To Michigan Engineering, on leaving Broadcom
The assay starts with the four most common cancers, lung, breast, prostate and colon, which together are more than half of cases worldwide. The project is collecting data for a few more years before it goes for FDA trials.
Three talks and interviews. Click one and it plays here.
Beyond 2Pi-Sigma
Drug delivery, a device worn on the skin, millimeter-wave networks, drinking water pulled out of the air. He is a named inventor or an adviser on all of it.
Vivera Pharmaceuticals
A dose-controlled delivery device that recognizes its own cartridge and refuses to work for anyone but the patient it was issued to.
Mediccene Inc.
A processor-controlled microneedle array worn on the skin. Swap the head and the same device becomes an interface to an IV needle and bag.
Peltbeam Inc.
Millimeter-wave mesh networking that lets a machine-learning controller decide how the beams are steered.
Peltier-based condensation that pulls drinking water from ambient air and filters it on the way out.
Other works:
Contact
Dr. Mehdi Hatamian
CEO and Founder, 2Pi-Sigma Corporation
Newport Beach, California
