CEO Interview: Sridhar Joshi of TenXer

Sridhar Joshi has more than Two and half decades of experience in the Semiconductor Industry. He spent Large part of his career working in various Engineering and leadership roles at National Semiconductor and Texas Instruments, including leading a company wide initiative for System Design and Technology, ARM Microcontroller based Platform for Analog Front End (AFE) Designs.

Tell us about your company?

TenXer was founded in 2016 and is backed by Silicon Valley Quad (SV Quad). We have developed into a market leader – enabling remote evaluation of Semiconductor ICs and Solutions with our unique “Lab-on-Cloud” offering.

With this LAB ON CLOUD platform TenXer helps System Designers gain access to an IC Evaluation Kit or A subsystem over the internet from anywhere in the world.

What this means is that our customers can make available their Hardware Solution or Evaluation Kits (“EVK”) on the TenXer Platform  as a Device Under Test (DUT).  System designers can control the System Setup – including instruments, Stimulus and probes using a browser based application and measure the performance – all in real time!

We are currently working with leading semiconductor companies globally with more than 80 Labs  hosted from Renesas and SiTIme.  Currently we have more than 10K system engineers globally who use the TenXer platform regularly.

What problems are you solving?

Choosing the right IC for use in a system design involves ordering and testing numerous EVKs, this could go on for a few months – very often due to shipment delays and delays in response to application support requests or even the supply-chain issues.

The TenXer platform is designed to solve this issue, helping both semiconductor suppliers and system designers.

Don’t get me wrong, we are NOT saying that system designers will never buy EVK Hardware again. In fact, they may actually need to purchase the EVKs as the mover along the design process.   We allow system designers to Explore various IC solutions available, Evaluate their performance in a system setup  and even Co-develop for a PoC to  choose the right solution with  instant online access. This saves time and accelerates GTM.

This also helps Semiconductor companies increase reach, improve velocity and reduce costs, resulting in significant competitive advantage, increased sales and profitability.

What application areas are your strongest?

We are quite diverse, on the solutions & products we have hosted including Motor Control, Timing & Clocks, Automotive Electronics & EV,  Image processing and MCUs with focus on IOT, Sensor Connectivity & Analog Front Ends.

What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?

Our offering is quite unique with pretty much no other company offering anything comparable to the TenXer platform. Very often it is a matter of Make-vs-Build for our customers. During the Covid years companies have developed some kind of remote testing capabilities which allows their employees to access test platforms over VPN.

Due to security reasons, these internally built solutions cannot be made available to 3rd parties including customers. Also, Tenxer has developed Hardware and Software IP which accelerate onboarding EVKs and solutions to potentially 2 weeks.

Reliability, Security Platform accelerators IPs,  and our strong team of 40 engineers who have specialized in accelerated the cloudification process, are our primary differentiators.

What new features/technology are you working on?

We have built the capability to develop and execute embedded software code such AI algorithms on difficult to find hardware boards such as the Google Corel Board and Nvidia Jetson Nano.

On the Hardware side, we have a focus on evaluation of FPGA boards – since these usually cost upwards of $1000; and system engineers really are looking to ensure they buy the right boards.

We have some really cool features such as an AI enabled, Knowledge Assistant to explore and compare, Copilot as an   application support which has been extensively tested by both TenXer and our customer. You will be seeing this soon on the platform at www.tenxerlabs.com

How do customers normally engage with your company?

We usually engage with the Product Management, Applications Engineering and Sales teams of semiconductor companies.

The EVKs and Solutions are identified by our customers and hosted on the TenXer platform within 2-8 weeks depending on the complexity and maturity of the solution. These EVKs and Solutions are interfaced to the TenXer platform and can be physically hosted at TenXer or Customer’s labs.

For system engineers we have 100% free access and they can sign-up at  www.tenxerlabs.com and start evaluating the 80 designs we are hosting as of December 2023.

Visit us at the DesignCon 2024 Event in Santa Clara Booth #607 – to  see in real-time how TenXer Labs works and interact with our experts.

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