Rick Tewell has been a combination of a long time customer, co-worker, and friend of Mr. Jarmon for multiple years. “I am the Vice President at System solutions, so my role at the company Verisilicon which develops IP, which is Intellectual Property for companies who make semiconductors. Semiconductors are the chips that power things like mobile phones or all the electronics in your computer, electronics anywhere. Inside of a semiconductor you’re going to have multiple pieces of technology that do different things. So you’re going to have a technology block inside that can do audio, video, wifi, any of those sort of things. What Verisilicon does is they design and invent the IP that a chip company would use to manufacture a semiconductor product. My job is to see how all of those would work in a system standpoint so if you could imagine an engineer developing something for a car but he doesn’t know he’s building a car. They just describe an engine but he doesn’t know if it’s going in a boat, an airplane, or a car. A lot of times Semiconductor developers, develop without a knowledge of the entire system. A system might be a cell phone, it might be a navigation system in your car, it might be a laptop computer, it might be an electrical musical instrument, whatever it is there’s a system involved. My job is to ensure that the intellectual property, the technology that we develop, is applicable for the system that it’s going in. That we’re not designing something that someone can’t use because it doesn’t work properly in the system. So that’s my role within the company to oversee the technology aspects from a systems standpoint.” -Rick Tewell