Faysal Sohail

Faysal A. Sohail
Faysal Sohail
Born	1963 (age 53–54) Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia
Residence	Hillsborough, California, USA
Alma mater	University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Occupation	-Managing Director, Presidio Partners -Vice Chair of the Board, Silicon Valley Education Foundation -Entrepreneur -Venture Capitalist
Spouse(s)	Shazia Sohail
Children	4

Faysal A. Sohail (born December 1963) is an American venture capitalist and Managing Director at Presidio Partners in San Francisco. Sohail was a co-founder of Silicon Architects and on the founding team of Actel Corporation, two influential companies in the computer chip industry. Sohail serves as Vice Chair of the Board of the Silicon Valley Education Foundation.

Sohail was born in Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia to Rashid Sohail and Anjam Sohail. Rashid Sohail, his father, was a prominent executive with Saudi Aramco in the Dhahran office, a position he held for nearly 30 years. Anjam Sohail, his mother, is the elder sister of deceased nuclear scientist, Dr Mujaddid Ahmad Ijaz. Sohail attended high school both in Saudi Arabia and the U.S. including The Miller School of Albemarle in Virginia. Sohail attended the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering in 1985 and was a James Scholar. He also took graduate classes at Stanford University and consulted for Professor Abbas El Gamal at Stanford.

Sohail spent his early career working in integrated circuit (IC) design engineering and marketing at LSI Corporation and Actel Corporation During Sohail’s tenure, Actel developed breakthrough technology in the form of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) semiconductor chips. FPGA technology enabled creation of electronic products at a low cost, and to be reconfigured in the field when needed as opposed to sending them to a manufacturer for fabrication. Development of this technology revolutionized the chip market and created a worldwide $3 billion industry. In 1990 Sohail co-founded Silicon Architects, a company that pioneered the complex Structured ASIC (application-specific integrated circuits) Methodology called Cell-Based Array (CBA). The ASIC architecture was considered the new design technology of choice to develop very complex ASICs for cutting-edge applications such as multimedia, graphics and telecommunications. Silicon Architects was one of the first Silicon intellectual property companies. They designed the fundamentals of computer chips, creating a platform on which companies could build chips with higher performance that used lower power, and then licensed the technology. Synopsys Inc. acquired Silicon Architects in 1995. Sohail worked for Synopsys as Senior Vice President of the Intellectual Property group and then as Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy.

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