Most of Andreas‘ professional was related to FPGAs. He designed a full custom ASIC during his EE master thesis and joined Actel (now Microchip) engineering in Sunnyvale, California. After returning to Germany he worked as an FPGA and hardware developer for Traceport-Analyzers at Lauterbach Datentechnik. Over the past 15 years he was in various business development roles all FPGA related. Since 2023 he is CEO of TRS-STAR a European distributor focusing on suppliers with great products and high growth potential. FPGAs are still his passion and he strongly believes in the benefits of the Efinix Quantum technology.

Markus Pfaff adopted HDL for digital design in 1989 and did the first HDL based FPGA design ever done at the Technical University Darmstadt starting in the winter of 1991 in the proprietary hardware description language REGLAN at a time when synthesis simply was not available and rudimentary simulation ran on a VAX VMS computer occupying a large room in the university basement. Ever since he focused his career on FPGA and ASIC design methodology as well as advanced co-simulation techniques and engaged in several academic and industrial projects including the design of the Infineon S-GOLD chip, which you find at the heart of the original iPhone. In 2002 he was appointed as a full professor at the University of Applied Sciences of Upper Austria at Hagenberg. His recent research topics span design and verification methodology especially targeting signal processing applications. He is co-founder and CEO of the Austrian-based embedded and FPGA design service provider P2L2 and runs an FPGA consulting business since 2004. Markus Pfaff holds a Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from Technical University Darmstadt and a PhD in the field of methods for advanced digital simulation from Johannes Kepler University Linz.