SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- KeyEye Communications, Inc., a leader in multi-gigabit-per-second copper-media transceivers, today announced the appointment of Dr. Marwan Hassoun as Senior Vice President of Engineering. An industry veteran with more than 20 years experience, Dr. Hassoun brings to KeyEye Communications a unique blend of skills in high speed communications, mixed-signal design, IC process technology, and partnership management at both large, industry-leading IC manufacturers and emerging startup firms.

“By taking advantage of analog signal processing methodologies instead of traditional DSP techniques, KeyEye’s innovative EchoWave™ technology overcomes many of the signal impairment issues common to 10 Gbps transmission over copper,” said Harvey Scull, President and CEO of KeyEye. “Marwan’s extensive background leading teams in high speed communications design projects, and his extensive experience in leading-edge, mixed-signal design will help us develop the next generation of transceivers based on our EchoWave architecture.”

High -speed communications expertise

Dr. Hassoun comes to KeyEye directly from Xilinx, Inc, the leading provider of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), where he served as Senior Director for the Communications Technology Division. In that role he managed a large team of engineers distributed across three design sites. In charge of developing the high speed serial I/O technology for Xilinx, Dr. Hassoun’s team was responsible for analog, digital, and mixed-signal IC design in deep submicron CMOS as well as modeling, applications engineering, signal integrity, test, and packaging issues.

Prior to his tenure at Xilinx, Dr. Hassoun played a key role in the evolution and management of communications IC startup RocketChips, Inc, a leading developer of high-speed CMOS transceivers. As Senior Technical Director and Vice President of Wired Products, Dr. Hassoun worked with the company’s key customers on standards based products such as IEEE 1394, Gigabit Ethernet, and XAUI in addition to high-speed ADC and DAC products.

Dr. Hassoun’s extensive mixed-signal design experience includes a stint with Texas Instruments where he was responsible for the design of several power management ICs. In addition, Dr. Hassoun co-founded in 1996 and served as director of the Analog and Mixed-signal VLSI Design Center at Iowa State University. In that role he helped attract sponsorships from major companies including Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Rockwell, and others.

In his new position Dr. Hassoun will report directly to KeyEye Communications President and CEO Harvey Scull.

“KeyEye’s Echowave technology offers a distinct competitive advantage in terms of performance, power, and cost over alternative approaches to 10 Gbps transmission over copper and the company’s management team has done an outstanding job positioning the firm to take the lead in this emerging market,” said Dr. Hassoun. “With my experience in high speed communications and IC design, I look forward to helping KeyEye into its next phase of growth.”

KeyEye Communications Inc.