mmTron, Inc., a fabless designer of mmWave broadband products for the satcom, 5G/6G, aerospace and defense markets, has named RF/microwave industry veteran Gary Lerude as marketing director, with responsibility for defining and implementing the marketing strategy to communicate mmTron’s unique capabilities and products.

Lerude brings over four decades of marketing, business development and product management expertise at leading semiconductor firms, driving the development and commercialization of pioneering technology, from device to system, across both defense and commercial markets.

Lerude most recently served as technical editor for Microwave Journal (MWJ), the industry’s leading authority on RF and microwave technology. His eight-year tenure at MWJ helped strengthen its reputation for in-depth, quality coverage of both technical and business trends.

Lerude began his career as at Texas Instruments (TI), where he helped birth the GaAs MMIC industry, ushering in the era of monolithic integrated circuits, which today play a key role in both commercial and military microwave systems because of the technology’s reduced size, low-cost, high reproducibility and repeatable performance. During his 19-year tenure at TI, he held a range of roles, from design engineering and program and product management to marketing and business development.   

Following TI, Lerude held product management and business development roles at M/A-COM and at TriQuint Semiconductor, prior to its merger with RFMD to create Qorvo. At M/A-COM, Lerude supported two acquisitions during a time of consolidation in the RF/microwave industry, which enabled the company to expand and strengthen its position in defense markets.

“We’re pleased to have someone with Gary’s experience and capabilities to take mmTron’s story to the industry in this pivotal coming-out year for the company,” says Seyed Tabatabaei, founder and CEO of mmTron.

“Joining mmTron echoes the excitement of my early days at TI,” adds Lerude, noting that mmTron is newly emerging in the mmWave market. “mmTron is all about offering differentiated performance using GaN and GaAs technologies. The technical team is focused on optimizing output power, efficiency and linearity in products that are the next frontier in mmWave 5G and satcom infrastructure.”

Lerude is a life member of IEEE and the Microwave Theory and Technology Society (MTT-S).