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Sammy Cheung, Efinix’s founder and CEO, started the company in 2012 to address customers looking for something different from existing FPGA solutions. In an EE Times video interview published October 5, 2023, he reflects on his career, the challenges of building an FPGA company and the changes he believes the industry needs.
Who is Sammy Cheung?
Cheung is an electronics-industry veteran whose career has focused on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). He is the founder and CEO associated with Efinix, the programmable-chip company he launched in 2012.
The EE Times interview, part of its Silicon Grapevine video series, presents his story as both a career account and a discussion of company building. It covers how he entered electronics, the opportunity that led him to Cypress Semiconductor, the highs and lows of starting an FPGA company, what excites him and what he is most proud of.
Why did Cheung start Efinix?
According to EE Times’ synopsis, Cheung concluded in 2012 that time was running short to respond to customers who wanted something different. The publication summarizes his sense of urgency with the phrase “clock was ticking”; because the available page is a synopsis rather than a full transcript, treat that wording as the publisher’s summary, not a verified verbatim quote from Cheung.
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Efinix grew out of that customer demand for alternatives in programmable logic. The interview’s central idea is that established approaches are not the only possible way to serve designers: there is room to pursue different FPGA solutions. It does not, however, provide benchmark results or a head-to-head comparison that would establish how Efinix products perform against competitors.
What change does the interview point to?
The title’s “waiting for change” framing refers to the opportunity Cheung saw in customer interest in different FPGA options. The interview connects that opportunity to the practical work of founding and building a company, rather than presenting a quantified prediction about when the FPGA market will shift or how large the shift will be.
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Efinix’s public company-news index places the interview among coverage of FPGA density, edge AI, RISC-V system-on-chips, hardware acceleration and programmable chips. Those topics show the areas in which the company positions its broader work; they do not by themselves demonstrate product performance or market adoption.
What happened after Efinix began?
Efinix marked its tenth anniversary in 2022 by moving into new offices in Cupertino, California, according to the EE Times account. That milestone offers context for the company-building thread in the interview: Cheung’s decision in 2012 became the starting point for a decade of company development.
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What the interview does—and does not—establish
- It establishes: Cheung’s stated motivation to address customer demand for something different in FPGAs, the company’s 2012 founding, and the career-and-company-building focus of the conversation.
- It does not establish: comparative FPGA performance, market share, revenue, funding, adoption rates or a specific timetable for industry change. The cited interview synopsis supplies none of those figures.
The video interview was published by EE Times on October 5, 2023. Nitin Dahad, identified on the page as EE Times editor-in-chief, is credited as its author. For Cheung’s precise words or a specific technical claim, consult the video rather than treating the synopsis as a transcript.
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