Chi-Foon Chan (born October 3, 1949) is an American business executive and engineer. Chan is currently co-CEO of Synopsys. Prior to Synopsys, Dr. Chan worked at NEC, where he was general manager of the microprocessor group and responsible for marketing all NEC chip devices in North America. Prior to NEC, Dr. Chan was an engineering manager at Intel.
He earned his bachelor of science in Electrical Engineering (Bachelor of Engineering) from Rutgers University in 1972. He then studied Computer Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, earning his Master's degree in 1974 and Doctor of Philosophy in 1977.[1]
Chan was recruited to work at Intel Corporation by Marcian Hoff. From 1978 to 1986, he worked in Intel’s Application Research Group as engineering manager, supervising advances in speech recognition technology and development of 2920 DSP application software.[2]
Chan then moved to NEC Corporation, where he served as general manager of the microprocessor group. In this role, he negotiated for NEC to adopt the MIPS processor and marketed all NEC Microprocessor and DSP chip devices in North America.
In 1990, Chan joined Synopsys[3] as Vice President of Applications and Services, developing the Technical Field organization. Chan was then promoted to President and COO, and for the next 14 years he guided internal operations and worldwide field organizations.[4][5][6] In 2012, he was appointed President and co-CEO.[7][8][9]
In this role, he has helped Synopsys enter various markets, including Internet Protocol,[10] software testing[11] and security.[12] Additionally, he facilitated acquisitions of Avanti,[13] Coverity, Virage Logic,[14][15] Codenomicon, Magma Design Automation,[16] Cigital, SpringSoft[17][18][19] and Black Duck.
In 2004, Chan was awarded First Industry Fellow by the International Society for Quality Electronic Design.[20]
In 2014, Chan was awarded the Republic of Armenia President's Education Award.[21]
In 2019, Chan was awarded the Distinguished Science and Technology Award at the Asian American Engineer of the Year Award conference.[22]
In 2020, Chan was awarded the State Award of the Republic of Armenia for Global Contribution in IT sphere by Chief of Staff of the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia Arayik Harutyunyan.[23]