picoChip appoints Steve Laurenson as VP Engineering

Laurenson joins picoChip from Agere Systems (formerly Lucent Technologies Microelectronics), where, amongst other roles, he established the company’s 50-strong European GSM Development Centre. In this role, and subsequently as Agere’s Mobile Terminal Division’s Technical Services Director, he has extensive experience in directing teams to develop, deploy and support handset reference designs. He will bring these talents to picoChip’s own range of reference designs, serving customers in the highly cost-competitive wireless market.

“Organisationally, this is a key appointment,” said Guillaume d’Eyssautier, President and CEO of picoChip. “Steve’s appointment will focus our development teams on serving our customers in the WiMAX and femtocell sectors which have grown to be our core business. He will work closely alongside our CTO Doug Pulley, who will take on a strategic role in driving the company into new markets. In this way we can achieve the next step-change in our development: the move towards our ambition to be a $100million company.”

“I’m delighted to be joining picoChip,” said Laurenson. “The company has first class technology and I’m looking forward to making my contribution to maintaining that leadership. Working alongside Doug gives us the structure and resources to produce technology today that perfectly serves customers’ needs, whilst simultaneously looking ahead to newer developments such as IEEE 802.20 and Ultra Mobile Broadband.”