Neil Weste

Neil H. E. Weste (born 1951), is an Australian inventor and engineer, noted for having designed a 2-chip wireless LAN implementation and for authoring the textbook Principles of CMOS VLSI Design. He has worked in many aspects of integrated-circuit design and was a co-founder of Radiata Communications.

Weste grew up in the Riverland Region of South Australia. He received a BSc in Physics in 1974, a BE in 1976, and a Ph.D. in 1978, all from the University of Adelaide. Weste worked at a number American technology firms, including Bell Telephone Laboratories, Microelectronics Center of North Carolina, Symbolics, Agile Systems, and TLW. He was also at Duke University and the University of North Carolina.

In 1995 he returned to Australia as a professor at Macquarie University. In 1997 he started Radiata Communications with David Skellern where the first 802.11a chip was designed. The company was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2001. After the acquisition, Weste remained with Cisco for 2 years and then founded NHEW R&D, a technology-investment and consulting firm that he continues to manage.

In 2011, Weste joined a small company called OzRunways to help develop aviation mapping applications for the Apple iPad.

Weste has 14 U.S. patents to his name, including a number of methods for doing wireless communication in CMOS integrated circuits.

In 1998, Weste produced a CMOS chipset for the IEEE 802.11a wireless LAN. He did the conception, managed the project, and participated in the design.

Weste's textbook, Principles of CMOS VLSI Design (initially coauthored with Kamran Eshraghian but now coauthored with David Harris) is a standard textbook in integrated-circuit design courses. It has been translated into Japanese, Greek, and Chinese.

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