New CEO pushes fast Spice innovator

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — EDA startup Nascentric Inc., which claims an order-of-magnitude speedup over existing fast Spice simulators, has been slow in bringing its product to market. But the company's new CEO, Rahm Shastry, is on a mission to put Nascentric on a fast track to success.

Nascentric announced Thursday (Jan. 11) that Shastry has been appointed as president and CEO, replacing founding CEO Vess Johnson, who will remain with Nascentric as vice president of applications and consulting services. Shastry was most recently CEO of Tharas Systems, which was recently acquired by emulation vendor EVE.

Shastry said he decided not to move to EVE, and was looking for other opportunities when he came across Nascentric. "Something is needed to address the needs of the sub-65 nm market in the verification space," he said. "I saw Nascentric had the next-generation fast Spice simulator, and that excited me."

In February 2005 Nascentric introduced Nacsim, a transistor-level circuit simulator that was claimed to be the first such tool to use current-based models. Nascentric claimed that Nascim provides a ten-fold speedup in fast Spice simulation. The product was expected to ship in April 2005.

Although the name was recently changed to AuSIM, the product still hasn't shipped in production. As of now, Shastry said, it's in beta sites. "The company has been slightly behind in terms of schedule," he said.

"My goal is to get the product out and get to market," Shastry said. "We've engaged with several customer evaluations at this point, and we're pretty excited about the progress we have made. So the goal is to close on that and make some money."

Shastry also helped bring some new venture capital funding to Nascentric, which has raised $11 million so far. The exact amount of the new funding, he said, is still to be determined, but is "several million."

Nascentic employs around 20 people and is headquartered in Austin, Texas. Shastry will be located in Silicon Valley, where part of his goal is to expand the company's sales and engineering staff in that area. Shastry previously held management positions with Cadence Design Systems, Triquest Design Automation, and Viewlogic Systems.