Mitsuo Saito received the BSEE and MSEE degrees from the Electronic Engineering division of the University of Tokyo in 1972 and 1974, respectively. He then joined Toshiba Corporation's Research and Development Center. From 1984 to 1985, he was assigned as a visiting scholar to the MIT Media Lab, where he did research into 3-D graphics and human computer interface.
From 1986, Mr. Saito started a 3-D graphics chip development project, which later led to the chip adopted for the Sony Playstation 1. Then, from 1997, he became Director of Toshiba’s System ULSI Engineering Lab where he was responsible for the development of the graphics processor chip for Sony's Playstation 2.
In July 2001, he became Chief Fellow of Toshiba’s in-house semiconductor Company and took charge of the Broadband System LSI project, which has developed the Cell Processor and its peripheral chips. As of 2007, Mr. Saito became Vice President of Engineering, Toshiba Semiconductor Company.
Ward Vercruysse is a design automation expert. He started his career in Silvar-Lisco, one of the first publicly traded EDA (electronic design automation) companies. He developed analog (electrical) and digital (dsp) simulator. At Silicon Compiler Systems, another innovative EDA pioneer, he worked on circuit analysis and optimization, and design frameworks.
At Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) he took on various roles. He created and managed the CAD group responsible for internally developed analysis tools tuned for high performance design and he architected various electrical verification and optimization tools. As a senior manager he was responsible for the complete design environment for the UltraSparc family. As a Distinguished Engineer, his focus was on improving the processes and the tool integrations to improve productivity.
At Advanced Micro Systems, Ward was a Fellow and Director of CAD, responsible for the design environment used to design the 64bit single and multi core micro processors. His main interests are Technology, CAD (algorithm, framework, data models, analysis, optimization) and Processes (and lack thereof) in engineering organizations. Ward has a MSEE (Magna Cum Laude), from the University of Leuven, Belgium and an MBA, from Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California.