- om Jackson is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of SoftChip , leading a mission to rethink the foundations of semiconductor computing for the artificial intelligence era. Through visionary leadership, strategic partnerships, and unwavering determination, he is helping transform breakthrough engineering concepts into practical technologies that could shape the next generation of intelligent computing.
- SoftChip was founded by three accomplished semiconductor leaders who previously worked together at Intel, bringing together decades of expertise in semiconductor innovation, commercialization, and business leadership. Co-Founder and CEO Tom Jackson of SoftChip leads market development, strategic partnerships, and customer engagement; Co-Founder and CTO Jim Davis, a semiconductor innovator with more than four decades of experience at IBM, Intel, and other technology leaders, invented DRDCL and authored numerous foundational patents in differential cascode logic and reconfigurable semiconductor architectures; while Co-Founder Ash Gupte, a seasoned semiconductor executive, entrepreneur, investor, and former founding member of Intel Capital, leads the company’s corporate strategy and commercialization, positioning SoftChip to bring its proprietary DRDCL platform and Soft-NMC solutions to the global AI and semiconductor industry.
- Armed with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering and an MBA in Marketing from West Virginia University, Tom developed a rare combination of technical expertise and commercial insight early in his career. That unique educational foundation continues to shape his leadership, enabling him to bridge advanced semiconductor innovation with customer needs, strategic partnerships, and sustainable business growth.
- Throughout an entrepreneurial career spanning multiple technology ventures, Tom has founded, grown, and repositioned companies while forging strategic partnerships with industry leaders including Intel, Microsoft, Adobe, Ericsson, and AT&T. His ability to translate highly complex engineering innovations into compelling business value has earned the confidence of customers, investors, and partners while accelerating the commercialization of emerging technologies.
- Recognizing that artificial intelligence’s greatest performance challenge is no longer compute power alone but the enormous volume of memory movement created by KV-cache and attention traffic, Tom chose to challenge conventional thinking. Rather than accepting existing limitations, he pursued a fundamentally different approach that seeks to reduce unnecessary data movement before it reaches the memory interface, unlocking greater performance from existing hardware.
- Building upon decades of differential cascode logic research, SoftChip is commercializing DRDCL by extending that proven foundation with patented Cross-Switch technology and nanosecond-scale dynamic reconfiguration. The architecture is designed to enable multiple useful outputs from a common logic evaluation while increasing effective logic density, reducing switching activity, and delivering significantly more useful computation per transistor, per cycle, per square millimeter, and per joule.
- That vision became Soft-NMC, SoftChip’s first commercial near-memory computing platform designed specifically for AI inference. According to SoftChip, the architecture targets dramatic reductions in KV-cache and attention data movement while aiming to deliver significantly higher sustained throughput across HBM and GDDR memory platforms without requiring changes to the programming model.
- Beyond AI inference, the DRDCL platform continues to expand through innovations including ARMOR, Soft-TTC, in-logic state retention, adaptive logic, repair and remapping, and characterizable semiconductor IP. Together, these initiatives are intended to improve throughput, energy efficiency, silicon resilience, effective yield, and long-term scalability across next-generation semiconductor architectures.
- Working closely with semiconductor manufacturers, AI hardware companies, memory providers, foundries, and strategic ecosystem partners, SoftChip is accelerating the commercial adoption of DRDCL through collaboration and technology validation. Tom readily recognizes that meaningful innovation is never the achievement of one individual alone, crediting his co-founders, engineers, product teams, and ecosystem partners for helping transform DRDCL from a breakthrough concept into a commercially focused semiconductor platform.
- Behind every breakthrough in semiconductor history is someone willing to challenge assumptions that others accept as permanent, and Tom’s journey reflects that enduring spirit of innovation. While the semiconductor industry continues searching for new ways to advance artificial intelligence beyond Moore’s Law, his vision demonstrates that the future may also belong to technologies that make every transistor more intelligent, more efficient, and more valuable – an inspiring reminder that lasting progress is achieved through curiosity, collaboration, integrity, and the courage to imagine a better way forward.
**Excerpts from June 2026 interview with Daniel Nenni of SemiWiki.com .
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