Audience Appoints New Senior Executives

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Audience Inc., the leading provider of advanced voice and audio processors for the mobile and telecom marketplace, today announced two senior executive appointments:  Sanjay Adkar as vice president of engineering and Manish Singh as vice president of marketing.  Both positions report directly to president and chief executive officer Peter Santos.

In his new role, Adkar is responsible for the company's product development and technology roadmap, while leading the engineering teams managing VLSI, software and systems design.  Singh assumes responsibility for product strategy, management and marketing, plus applications development, and is charged with driving market growth and promotion of Audience technology worldwide.

"With proven track records in their respective fields of expertise, the addition of Sanjay and Manish to our senior leadership team will be instrumental to the company's efforts to maintain product leadership, develop markets, and continue our rapid growth," said Peter Santos, president and chief executive officer, Audience.  "Sanjay brings a wealth of semiconductor expertise in product design and development and the vision to advance our dynamic noise suppression and voice processing solutions.  Manish, with his extensive experience in technology marketing, will play a key role in identifying market and product development strategies that build demand, expand our global presence, and support sales growth."

Sanjay Adkar

Sanjay Adkar brings over 20 years of experience in engineering leadership positions with semiconductor businesses.  Most recently, he was executive vice president of engineering at Brightscale, Inc. managing worldwide engineering teams responsible for video processors and software development.  Previously, he was executive vice president of engineering for Netcell Corp. and held the same position with NeoMagic Corp. with additional responsibility for marketing and sales in Japan.  He also held engineering positions with National Semiconductor Corp., LSI Logic Corp., and Tandem Computers, Inc. earlier in his career.  Adkar earned a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Virginia Tech, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, India.

Manish Singh

Manish Singh brings extensive marketing and operational experience with technology start-ups and large corporations to his new role as vice president of marketing for Audience.  He was previously with STMicroelectronics, directing business and marketing strategies for the DisplayPort and Monitor product lines.  Before that, he served as vice president of cellular marketing for Mobilygen, Inc., which was acquired by Maxim Integrated Products, Inc.  He also held senior marketing roles with NVIDIA Corp. leading product management for the company's wireless media processors, MediaQ, Inc. (acquired by NVIDIA) and Synplicity, which was acquired by Synopsys, Inc.  Earlier in his career, he worked as a design engineer at Sun Microsystems, Inc.  Singh holds a master's degree in electrical engineering from Rice University and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology in India.

About Audience

Audience is a voice processor semiconductor company that enables clear communications anywhere with noise suppression technology based on the intelligence of the human hearing system.  The technology is applicable across a broad range of consumer products where voice needs to be intelligible in noisy environments.  Audience was the Silver Winner in the 2008 Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Awards and the Winner of the Semiconductor category.  The company was included in Gartner's "Cool Vendors in Semiconductors, 2008" and selected as the Most Innovative True Mobile Start-Up for the "2008 GSMA Mobile Innovation Global Awards."  Audience is one of 34 founding member companies of the Open Handset Alliance and the only provider of advanced noise suppression technology.  Investors in Audience include New Enterprise Associates, Vulcan Capital, Tallwood Venture Capital and VentureTech Alliance.  Audience is based in Mountain View, California.  www.audience.com

SOURCE Audience, Inc.