Leadership Team

Dr. Anirudh Devgan is President and CEO of Cadence Design Systems, Inc., and is a member of the Board of Directors. Prior to becoming CEO in 2021, he was President of Cadence, before which he served as Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Digital & Signoff and System Verification groups. Prior to joining Cadence in 2012, Dr. Devgan was Corporate VP and member of the executive staff at Magma Design Automation, and earlier held management and technical roles at IBM.

Dr. Devgan is widely recognized as one of the leading authorities in electronic design automation (EDA), and successfully pioneered the application of massively parallel and distributed architectures to create several industry firsts and most impactful products in the areas of SPICE simulation, library characterization, place and route, static timing, power and electromagnetics, among several others. He also drove the first common compiler architecture for emulation and prototyping platforms.

Dr. Devgan is an IEEE Fellow, has written numerous research papers, and holds 27 US patents. He has won several awards, including the prestigious Phil Kaufman Award for his extensive contributions to EDA as well as the IBM Corporate Award and IEEE McCalla Award. Dr. Devgan serves on the boards of the Global Semiconductor Alliance and the Electronic System Design Alliance.

Dr. Devgan received a Bachelor of Technology degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and MS and PhD degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Tom Beckley has served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Custom IC and PCB Group (CPG) since 2018, including responsibilities for IC Packaging and System Analysis. Since his joining Cadence in 2004, the group has commercialized multiple next-generation design technologies in analog, mixed-signal, RF, photonics, and wafer-level advanced packaging, and expanded into system analysis and circuit verification.

Beckley joined Cadence via the acquisition of Neolinear, a technology spin-out of Carnegie Mellon University, where he served as President and CEO. Prior to Neolinear, Beckley was head of the Systems Division at Avant! Corporation, President and CEO of Xynetix, and held engineering and management positions at Harris Corporation and General Motors.

Beckley received his BS in mathematics and physics from Kalamazoo College and an MBA from Vanderbilt University.

Dr. Paul Cunningham has served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the System Verification Group (SVG) since March 2021, running the division since 2018. His responsibilities include logic simulation, emulation, prototyping, formal verification, Verification IP, and functional debug. Prior to this role, Cunningham was responsible for Cadence's frontend digital design tools including logic synthesis and design-for-test.

Dr. Cunningham joined Cadence in 2011 via the acquisition of Azuro, a startup developing concurrent physical optimization and useful skew clock tree synthesis technologies, where he was a co-founder and CEO.

Dr. Cunningham holds a MS and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge in the UK.

Tina Jones has served as Senior Vice President of Global Human Resources since 2007, leading the team and operations around the world. Jones previously served as Vice President and Associate General Counsel. In that position, she advised the company on employment-related issues, policies, and practices, and oversaw litigation ranging from intellectual property and securities matters to commercial disputes.

Prior to joining Cadence in 2003, Jones was a litigator and employment counselor with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP.

Jones received her BA in political science from Stanford University and her Juris Doctor degree from UCLA Law School, where she served as an editor on the UCLA Law Review. Jones then clerked on the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

Nimish Modi serves as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Strategy and New Ventures and is responsible for corporate strategy, corporate and strategic marketing and industry standards. Modi also heads New Ventures and leads the Molecular Sciences Group which includes the OpenEye Scientific business, and is also responsible for Cadence Cloud and Mergers & Acquisitions. Prior to this role, he was Senior Vice President of research and development for the System & Software Realization Group at Cadence where he had responsibility for products and solutions in the areas of systems design and verification, package and board design, hardware/software co-development and system verification.

Prior to joining Cadence in 2006, Modi spent 18 years at Intel Corporation, where he was most recently a vice president in the Enterprise Platforms Group with responsibility for the company’s server CPU development.

Modi holds a BE in electrical engineering from the University of Bombay and a MS degree in computer engineering from Virginia Tech.

Karna Nisewaner has served as our General Counsel and Corporate Secretary since September 2022. Nisewaner is responsible for Cadence worldwide legal operations, covering matters such as corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, commercial transactions, employment, export compliance, government affairs, intellectual property, litigation, mergers and acquisitions, and stock administration. Prior to this role, she was Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Cadence where she led many key functions in the legal department.

Prior to joining Cadence in 2011, Nisewaner held in-house counsel roles at Intuit and IBM and was in private practice at Finnegan, Henderson, Farbow, Garrett, and Dunner, LLP focused on intellectual property.

Nisewaner received her BSE in civil engineering and operations research from Princeton University and her Juris Doctor degree from UCLA Law School.

Dr. Chin-Chi Teng has served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Digital and Signoff Group (DSG) since 2018. Prior to this role, Teng held senior leadership positions in research and development in digital implementation.

Dr. Teng joined Cadence in 2002 via the acquisition of Silicon Perspective Corporation and subsequently led various research and development groups. He brought deep technical knowledge and more than 20 years of industry and academic experience to his role as leader of the IC Digital group.

Dr. Teng holds a BS in electrical engineering from the National Taiwan University and an MS and PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds seven patents, and has written many EDA papers, several deep learning papers, and a book, Electrothermal Analysis of VLSI Systems.

John Wall has served as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) since 2017. He is responsible for the company’s overall finance, tax, and accounting functions, as well as business operations, enterprise data and analytics, investor relations, and global strategic sourcing. Wall also leads the Real Estate and Workplace organization, which manages over 50 Cadence sites worldwide.

Wall previously served as Corporate Controller and in other positions for more than 20 years, starting in our Dublin, Ireland office before moving to our San Jose Headquarters in 2015. At the beginning of his tenure with Cadence, Wall implemented the company’s international corporate structure, and was instrumental in the creation of several of the company’s sales models and its transition to a recurring revenue model.

Wall is a Fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants and holds an NCBS from the Institute of Technology, Tralee in Ireland.

Neil Zaman serves as Chief Revenue Officer and has been Senior Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations (WFO) since 2015. As Chief Revenue Officer, Zaman is responsible for the Sales, Services, Field Engineering, and Customer Support teams that manage customer relationships around the world, driving customer success via the Cadence Intelligent System Design strategy. Prior to this role, he held various leadership positions in WFO, driving initiatives to strengthen the company’s relationship and grow business with the top North American strategic accounts.

Prior to joining Cadence in 1999, Zaman held key positions at Phoenix Technologies and IBM.

Zaman attended SUNY Stony Brook and then California State University, Hayward, where he earned his BSc in finance.