All TFI Projects are personally overseen by CTO Richard Norm

---

30+ years of experience in architecture, implementation and optimization of software, hardware, thermal, optical and mechanical systems. 34 U.S. patents issued. B. Sc. Physics (with honors), Clarkson, 1980. 

TFI / xVI:              Lead researcher on high-efficiency / low-cost TLC system 

2014-current    Designed large-area 130 W/cm2 micro-channel cooler for TPV tiles 

                                   Designed small 1500 W/cm2 semi-passive cooler for aerospace applications 

                                   Designed eye-safe system for powering drone at ~10 km via laser/telescope 

SpaceWatts:     Led design and prototyping of dense-receiver-array CPV for 1000x 

2007-2014        concentration using low-cost mirrors made with flat glass. Design had high 

                                   efficiency, few parts/Watt & potential for lower LCOE than Fresnel HCPV.

DreamWafer:   Led architecture of hardware/software integration accelerator featuring

2006-2013        rapid prototyping and any-connection debug for high-end circuit boards 

                                   Lead industrial technologist on 7-university project for largest-known 

                                   (250 cm2) ASIC, with >1 million I/Os for alignment insensitive contacts.

PROMPT:            12 years on Board of PROMPT (Gov’t/University/Industry funding organization), 

2002-2021         also chaired PROMPT’s project evaluation committees for 12 years.

Hyperchip           Architected and optimized extreme-performance router data planes for 

2005-2015         Altera, Xilinx and Achronix FPGAs and leading-edge memories. 

(CTO)                      Designed key algorithms for FPGA data planes to achieve 4x ASIC density.

                                       * Ultra-efficient latency-tolerant queue management for DRAM queues 

                                       * Created pipeline architecture for simple single-cycle pipelining in FPGAs

                                       * Created Longest-Prefix-Match CAM with ~40x the density of TCAM

                                   Architected FPGA-based PCI-e-card terabit router accelerators. 

Hyperchip:         Raised over $100M, built engineering team to over 200 people,

1997-2004             recruited experienced management, and then returned to technical work.

(President           Led design of first scalable traffic management for packet networks, which 

and CTO)                  tier-1 carriers stated delivered the world’s best QoS for packet networks.

                                   Pioneered massively parallel semiconductors for network equipment with 

                                       first-pass success on the largest ASIC IBM had ever made for a 3rd party.

                                   Designed the first scalable routing protocols and route-table manager.

                                       * Developed logic to reduce 768-bit ECC implementation in FPGA by 16x.

                                       * Developed algorithms to shrink 160 Gb/s FPGA packet switch 10x.

                                       * Developed single-cycle-update BCAMs 70x smaller than standard version.

VCS:                        Lead architect on Vermont Views 4.0, HighTest 2.0, and Ghost 1.5. 

1991-1996         Created world’s fastest ‘life’ cellular algorithm (10X faster than previous record).

IBM:                        Won the IBM General Technology Division’s highest award for innovation 

1980-1988         for developing a software environment with over 100 highly-configurable ‘apps’ 

                                   including the first full-screen e-mail and file managers for IBM computers.  

                                   Customizable context-sensitive commands + longest-prefix-match intelligent 

                                   interpretation  won the software the highest ratings for usefulness, friendliness 

                                  and flexibility of all software used in IBM Burlington.