The Richwood Group was founded in 1997 to provide training and training
consultancy services to the electronics industry. With a combined working
experience of over 38 years in the semiconductor industry, the partners
have sought to capitalize on their extensive knowledge base and, at the
same time, help others succeed in their chosen careers.
Background and Objectives
The rapid expansion of the electronics and so-called "high-tech"
industries has created a large demand for support personnel (sales, marketing,
production controllers, finance, legal, inside sales, human resources, etc.).
Although the people employed in these positions have little or no formal
training in engineering or technology, they are expected (by the demands
of their position) to have a fundamental grasp of the nature of their products
and industry. While this ability has traditionally been learned "on-the-job",
the rapidly changing nature of the business, the very mobile work force,
and the broad scope of information needed, has made on-the-job training
time consuming, cumbersome and inefficient. Today, more then ever before,
it is desirable to be able to offer support staff suitable training programs.
The seminars offered by the Richwood Group target this market.
An additional market is offered by financial and legal institutions. Much of the investment being made in new industry is in the high-tech field. Staff with non-technical backgrounds are being asked to interface and do business with the high-tech industry with minimal knowledge of the products, services, and structure of their customers or prospective clients. Again, fundamental technology training would be of a great advantage to these people. Brokers are a subset of the "financial" category. Although they may be well versed with a company's (financial) prospectus, when it comes to better understanding the technical side of a company's products, there is little in the way of "elementary overview" training available.
The Partners
Mitch Richman graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1977
with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Systems. He joined Fairchild
Semiconductor in 1977 as a product engineer, moving in 1981 to AMD as a
senior product marketing engineer. Since 1983, he has held a variety of
marketing, engineering, and business management positions with Advanced
Micro Devices, Mosel and Xilinx in the Bay Area. Mr. Richman has chaired
industry-wide standardization committees on memories and programmable logic,
and has written a number of papers and articles on a variety of technology
related topics
Philip A. Woodhead graduated from the University of Hull (UK) in 1979 with a B.Sc. in Electronic and Computer Engineering. From 1979 to 1986 he was employed as an IC designer at Plessey Telecommunications Ltd. in Beeston (UK) and Hughes Microelectronics Ltd. in Weybridge (UK). Since 1989 he has held marketing management positions at Siemens AG in Munich (Germany), as well as Xilinx Inc. and Toshiba America Electronic Components in San Jose, California. He has presented papers at a number of international conferences and hold a US patent for the design of innovative non-volatile memory products.
Training Consultants to the Semiconductor Industry
2064 Walsh Ave, Suite B-1
Santa Clara, CA 95050
Tel. (408) 986-0303 . Fax (408) 986-0304
www.richwood-group.com