Leon Stok, vice president of electronic design automation (EDA) at IBM, has been reelected as board chair of the Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) for 2026-2027.
Stok has served on Si2's board since 2007, holding several leadership positions over that time, including previous terms as board chair. At IBM, he leads a team responsible for delivering the design and verification tools used to build some of the company's most advanced computing systems, including IBM's Z and Power server systems as well as its Quantum Systems.
A well-established figure in the EDA field, Stok earned his Ph.D. from Eindhoven University in 1991. He has delivered more than 40 keynotes, invited talks, and tutorials at major IEEE and ACM conferences worldwide, as well as at leading universities. His research contributions include more than 60 published papers covering topics such as high-level architectural and logic synthesis, low-power design, placement-driven synthesis, and automated schematic placement and routing. He also holds 13 patents in the EDA field.
Alongside Stok, the newly elected Si2 board of directors for 2026-2027 includes representatives from major semiconductor and technology companies: Lu Dai, vice president of technical standards at Qualcomm Technologies; Jacob Avidan, senior vice president of the Silicon Technology Group at Synopsys; Niels Faché, senior vice president of design engineering software at Keysight; Jim Culp, corporate fellow at GlobalFoundries; Wilbur Luo, vice president of product engineering for the Custom IC and Custom Products Group at Cadence Design Systems; Manoj Selva, vice president and general manager of the Product Enablement Solutions Group at Intel; Jung Yun Choi, executive vice president of Samsung Electronics' Memory Business Design Technology Team; Bang-hyun Sung, distinguished engineer at SK Hynix; Mo Movahed, vice president at Siemens EDA; Gaurav Varshney, global director and technologist at Texas Instruments; Viraphol Chaiyakul, senior director of engineering at NXP Semiconductors; Aveek Sarkar, head of the Ecosystem and Alliance Management Division at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC); and Thomas Ahle, head of machine learning at Normal Computing Corporation.
