Founders' Biographies 3-3

Hojjat Salemi
CTO/Vice President of Engineering


Hojjat Salemi is one of three Cortina Systems founders, which started in October 2001. The vision of the company was to build a successful fab-less semiconductor company providing solutions for Ethernet connectivity for the Metro and Core networks. In his current role as Vice President of Engineering, Hojjat manages a worldwide team. His teams architect, design and validate ASSPs from concept to production. One of Cortina's key competitive advantages is our strong analog technology and Hojjat has grown the mixed signal technology team by three fold.

Prior to founding Cortina Systems, Hojjat was the CTO of Skystone, a fab-less semiconductor company specializing in Telecom interfaces for datacom systems based in Ottawa, Canada.
Before Skystone, Hojjat held technical and management roles in companies focused on delivering high revenue products. At Mitel, Hojjat's team evaluated and recommended acquisitions of ASSPs that provided Voice over ATM functions. At Fitel-PMX, Hojjat's team developed ISDN multiplexers for the Japan market. At NewBridge Networks, Hojjat architected TDM scalable switches.

Hojjat began his career at Nortel (Bell Northern Research), where he worked for 10 years.
Hojjat's undergraduate and graduate studies were at Ottawa University, where he graduated with honors with a Bachelor and Masters of Engineering.