Joachim Kunkel joined Synopsys in 1994 and is currently vice president and general manager of the Solutions Group. In that capacity, he manages the business units responsible for Synopsys DesignWare® intellectual property (IP), strategic market development and system-level design. Before coming to Synopsys, Mr. Kunkel was co-founder of CADIS GmbH in Aachen, Germany. There, he served as managing director and performed myriad duties in engineering, sales and marketing. Before co-founding CADIS, Mr. Kunkel was a research assistant at the Aachen University of Technology, where he conducted research in system-level simulation techniques for digital signal processing, with special emphasis on parallel computing. Mr. Kunkel holds an MSEE degree, the Dipl.-Ing. der Nachrichtentechnik, from the Aachen University of Technology.