IRVINE, Calif., Nov. 10, 2008 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Quartics, a provider of semiconductor and software media processing solutions, today announced that it has named Mario Rivas, formerly Executive Vice President of AMD, as its chief executive officer. He joins a Quartics management team that already includes a number of top technology industry veterans.
"We are thrilled to add someone of Mario's stature to Quartics' management team," said Safi Qureshey, chairman of Quartics. "His extensive semiconductor experience will be invaluable asset as we ramp our products. We know he is as excited as we are about the phenomenal opportunity that Quartics represents."
"Quartics is well on its way to becoming an industry leader in the media processing space," said Mario Rivas. "The company addresses a huge market -- the opportunity to get on computer motherboards comes along very rarely. From my interaction with PC manufacturers around the world, it is clear Quartics' products are in demand. I am looking forward to working with the team to grow Quartics into one of the top semiconductor companies in the world."
At AMD's Computing Solutions Group, Mario was responsible for driving the development, strategy and management for AMD's broad portfolio of consumer and commercial microprocessor solutions. He also served as corporate vice president for the Office of Strategy Management. In this position, he was responsible for driving AMD's strategic planning process. Before that, Rivas managed the communication businesses of Philips Semiconductor. He also served as a director of Taiwan Semiconductors Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC). Before Philips, Rivas spent 19 years at Motorola, Inc., with responsibilities in both the Semiconductor and Communication sectors. Rivas holds an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Central America in San Salvador and master's degrees in semiconductor physics and business from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
About Quartics
Quartics is a fabless semiconductor and software company that provides solutions based on the company's proprietary QVU(tm) architecture and media coprocessing technology. Located in Irvine, California, with offices throughout the world, Quartics is backed by leading venture capitalists. The company's products deliver HD-quality performance, including High Definition encode, decode, and transcode functionality in a low-cost, low-power platform. A fully programmable architecture, QVU enables devices to process any existing or future video codec standards and, when coupled with our proprietary pre- and post-processing image enhancement algorithms, provides a unique video processing solution for OEMs and ODMs. Quartics' solutions are ideally suited for PC, set top box and TV manufacturers requiring dramatically improved video performance.
Quartics has already received significant industry recognition, including Quartics' Media Coprocessor (MCP) being named as the industry's first Microsoft Widows 7 "SHED Architecture Compatible" component. Quartics has also received the California Technology 100, the CES 2008 Innovation and the Red Herring 2008 Global Finalist Awards. Visit www.quartics.com for more information.
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