Jay Nunez, CCO
Linda Wetzel
April 2024
Join us in a conversation with Jay Nunez, our new Chief Commercial Officer, as he shares his extensive semiconductor expertise and his vision for our company’s journey. With a career spanning over more than three decades, Jay brings a wealth of knowledge to our team.
Absolutely, thank you. I’ve been in the semiconductor industry and related electronic industries for over 35 years. I left Arizona State University with an engineering degree, and back then, I was excited to enter the new world of semiconductors, eager to explore its diverse technologies and their applications in systems that we use every day. The world of semiconductors is basically our world, there is very little that we are engaged with in our daily activities that do not involve them.
I’ve always embraced change and sought to learn constantly, not just within semiconductors but also in related industries that they feed into – wireless and computing systems, and so forth. These collective experiences have guided me toward seeking new opportunities, which has led me to where I am today.
This one is easy – my goal after a wonderful last ten years at AMD was to find yet another experience, I have not had. It was important to me to find a technology that I was not familiar with, that would challenge me, and that had the potential to make a significant impact on the industry. Black Semi provided the ideal fit.
It was the innovation with a new material – graphene – that caught my attention. The company is not just doing something new for the industry, but we are going to change everything.
And how to do that? Well, that’s exactly what I’m here to find out. It’s thrilling for us to be at the forefront of bringing graphene into the semiconductor industry. This will have a major impact, not only on the industry itself but also on the products and solutions our customers develop.
Black Semi has the potential to emerge as an industry influencer, and we will emerge as an industry influencer. This means that if we perform and execute as planned, we’ll drive the industry in a new direction to provide our customers with an opportunity to do exactly what they’ve been doing for decades themselves, and that’s to accelerate the industry toward innovation. As they succeed, so do we.
I knew I had a lot to learn about graphene and the company’s vision for its use in semiconductors. The learning cap is securely attached to my head because there’s much to absorb.
There is no doubt that I am in the right place to learn about graphene, we have some of the most recognized and knowledgeable people in the industry. So, all I have to do is reach out to anybody that’s in the company to sort out what I need to know and understand – not only about graphene but also from our engineers how our processes and designs are methodologies. So, it’s pretty exciting.
Learning is a two-way street; I hope to use my knowledge and experience to educate as well. There’s a lot of work to be done, not all in the labs. We also need to introduce ourselves to an industry with high expectations.
First things first, we have to decide how we are going to introduce ourselves to the industries. I am saying industries, plural because we have been talking a lot about the semiconductor industry, but there is also the electronic industry, which is well associated with semiconductors and can benefit from new technology as well. We must make strategic partnerships to find the right fit and ensure the industry knows who we are and what our graphene technology can achieve.
Our number one goal is establishing a signed engagement with a semiconductor partner to co-develop solutions that we can introduce to the market.
For an ideal partnership, we are looking at the applications that are most influential to the world at this stage. We are talking about AI – it’s hard not to hear those two letters when discussing technology. To get behind what we can do for AI, generative and embedded, we must focus on the connectivity barriers we are overcoming with our technology. We pave the way for the intense processing that needs to happen to realize the innovation that we’ll have in our daily lives.
I mentioned earlier that I have always been looking for change and more challenges. That is the one thing that is consistent with what drives me; the challenge that change provides. I don’t have a problem with embracing change – I’m not sure where that came from, but the bottom line is that I am not afraid to take on new challenges. I think it’s not usual, change usually scares people, makes them run away, and not look back … for whatever reason. But I was wired somewhere along the way to think, “Hey, this looks cool, let’s check it out.” I’ve just always been that way. When you take on new challenges, you invite change, period. No matter what it might be. That’s what I look for, it’s hard for me not to embrace it because that’s the world that we live in.
It’s a twofold answer. On the professional side, it’s what did I learn today? What did I teach today? Because both of these two things are important to me. And that also translates to the second half which is on the personal side. I have a wonderful family that I love being around and that I look forward to being around and spending as much time with as possible. But that goes in the same direction: what have I learned today? The change has to be positive for the family, not just for me, right? It’s not easy to bring these two worlds together, as everyone can, has, and does experience. But if at the end of the day you can say that you had fun, you embraced change, and you made a difference, that’s pretty cool.
We use graphene as enabler to create ultra-fast, energy-efficient, and scalable chip fabrics by connecting thousands of chips so they can interact as if they were one.
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