Professional Biography.
Peter McGuinness is US Director of Business Development at Imagination Technologies, Inc. a London Based company specialising in the development and licensing of hardware and software intellectual property for the mobile and consumer electronics markets. His professional background is in the architecture and design of integrated circuits and systems for graphics and video, where he has a number of patents and patent applications, as well as publications in learned journals and conference proceedings. He has a proven track record in formulating and promoting business opportunities based on emerging technologies, and in building organisations to deliver the products. His style of management is team oriented and collaborative with an emphasis on workflow automation and goal achievement.
He joined Imagination in April 2005 and prior to that has had a more than twenty-year career as a silicon chip designer and manager starting in 1980 at Plessey Research (Caswell) near Northampton, England where he helped in the design and productisation of a number of miltary and commercial linear amplifier circuits before switching to digital circuits using bipolar current mode logic technology.
In December 1983 he joined Inmos, Ltd. a startup company in Bristol, England where he moved into CMOS circuit design, producing a number of components for the Transputer parallel processing CPU, as well as contributing to the design of the world's first RamDac Chip, the IMS G170, as used in the IBM PS2. After leading the architecture and design of the industry's first integrated graphics controller-RamDacs, he eventually became responsible for program management of the company's workstation graphics adapters.
During this period, Inmos was bought twice, first by Thorn-EMI and then by SGS-Thomson, (now STMicroelectronics) and in 1992 Peter moved to San Jose, California to help with the specification and development of new product lines. As part of this exercise, he represented SGS-Thomson on the VESA standardisation committee, and contributed to a number of their standardisation efforts.
In 1993, he was instrumental in setting up the SGS-Thomson/nVidia joint development partnership. The strategic vision behind this project was to combine the emerging multimedia PC with the new possibility of integrating 3D graphics into a single chip to transform the PC into a fully fledged entertainment platform. This vision eventually resulted in the Riva 128, the PC industry's first mass market 3D graphics accelerator. For the duration of the Riva 128 project, Peter was responsible for the architecture of the video capture and display units of the Riva 128, working within the nVidia architecture team.
After the partnership ended, and ST decided to produce one more generation of the Riva 128, Peter took on the task of building a front-end design operation from scratch in order to achieve this. During 1998 and 1999, he created the hardware and software design teams as well as the applications support lab and was responsible for the architecture and front end design of the next generation Riva-based accelerator, which was launched as the Riva 128-DV in 1999. As part of this exercise, he architected a virtualisable MPEG 2 decode accelerator able to handle decode of multiple simultaneous MPEG 2 streams.
At the end of 1999, Peter moved into a central research department with the task of developing forward looking systems and technologies in 3D graphics and video. In pursuit of this, he moved to San Diego, California where he was appointed Research Director and manager of ST's Advanced Systems Technology unit. The special responsibilities of this unit, in addition to the research into graphics and video technologies, were to foster links with leading university based researchers working in various fields including wireless communications. Under his leadership, the twenty-man lab produced over 100 refereed publications and more than fifty patents over a five year period, in fields ranging from massively parallel computing through 3D video to Ultra wideband communications. It also maintained collaborative reseach programs with four University of California campuses, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Southern California, University of Toronto, and a number of Industry research partners, including Hewlett Packard Labs.