Who's Who

Nice to meet you, we are Sigasi!

We’re a dynamic, innovative, entrepreneurial, and creative team and we’re happy to see you!

Bart Brosens

Bart Brosens
Application Engineer

As a kid Bart wanted to know how televisions work. His parents gladly directed him towards electronics engineering to save their household appliances.

He started working for Easics in ASIC design and moved from Leuven to Ghent as both FPGA Engineer and FAE. Bart was himself a longtime user of Sigasi Studio before he joined the team.

When he’s not talking to Sigasi’s clients, Bart loves to sing in a choir, take long mountain hikes with his family or engage himself in local social activities in his neighbourhood.

Wim Meeus

Wim Meeus
Application Engineer

Wim inherited a handyman’s work ethic from his father and cousins. He learned wood work and electric circuits and was taught: “if you don’t have it, you can build it”. Good advice!

Self-taught programming skills became experience in digital electronics design with a passion for RTL design & validation, High Level Synthesis, and SoC Design. Wim likes to admin and support EDA tools for teams, using his FPGA and ASIC experience, and loves teaching VHDL and RTL design labs.

When he is not in engineering, you can find him running, climbing, and enjoying his family. When time permits, he works as a theatre technician.

Jane Judge

Jane Judge
Customer Success

Jane has always been passionate about international and intercultural communication, which led her to working in communications, marketing, and customer success. She’s always willing to help make someone’s experience better.

Previously, Jane has been an event organizer and marketeer as well as a public ambassador for Leuven MindGate, DSP Valley, and AI for Growth. As such, she’s incrementally immersed herself in the world of innovative technologies. Indeed, alongside her work at Sigasi, she also works part-time for the new SmartEEs Flexible and Wearable Electronics Association.

Travel is one of Jane’s passions, which is one reason she holds degrees in International Relations, French, and History from universities in the United States, France, and Scotland. Born in Leuven to American parents, who moved the family back to the US when she was 9, Jane returned to her beloved Belgium in 2016. She and her boyfriend live in Leuven with their cat Selene.

Hilde Pelfrene

Hilde Pelfrene
Administration

We want our customers to feel part of the family. And family starts with students in the case of Sigasi.

Hilde handles all educational requests for students, classrooms, and professors. And there are plenty. But her experience of over 20 years in handling a private family office makes Hilde the perfect professional to handle Sigasi’s administration, payroll, travel and accounting.

Hilde enjoys all fun things in life: pure cooking, spinning, fashion, family, and friends.

Sebastian Zarnekow

Sebastian Zarnekow
R&D Engineer

For Sebastian, everything started when Santa brought him an early 80386 processor for Christmas. Though gaming was fun, he found bending the rules behind games and their save formats even more exciting. After having taught himself different programming languages, Sebastian decided to become a Software Engineer, graduating in Computer Science and Business Economics in 2005.

Fast forward 20 years, and Sebastian can look back on a varied career in different companies, team setups, and domains, but his passion for challenging engineering problems is more alive than ever. One of the minds behind the Xtext framework, Sebastian enjoys making engineers more productive by providing them with great tools.

Sebastian regularly speaks at conferences, sharing his knowledge about compilers, software architecture, and best practices.

Pavel Parchenko

Pavel Parchenko
R&D Engineer

Being inspired by an older brother, Pavel taught himself to program. As a student at school he won multiple olympiads in programming.

Continuing his studies in Computer Science at the university was the only right thing to do. After university, Pavel started working at Aldec, which he knew from their relationship with the university. He worked for 8 years on the HDL linting and CDC analysis tool. Then he switched to Home Automation for a few years. In 2021 Pavel returned to EDA by joining Sigasi.

Pavel’s hobbies range from photography, snowboarding, and biking to many home projects. At the moment he enjoys reading a lot.

Ehab Younes

Ehab Younes
R&D Engineer

From an early age, Ehab displayed a keen interest in computers and their inner workings. He started programming at the age of 13 and went on to study Computer Engineering, where he delved into a range of topics such as data science, embedded systems, image processing, and web development.

During his university years, he dabbled in entrepreneurship and excelled in programming competitions like IEEEXtreme and ICPC, ultimately graduating as the top student in the engineering department.

Aside from his passion for technology, Ehab also enjoys spending time outdoors, hiking, traveling, and exploring new places. When not on an adventure, he can often be found relaxing with video games or hanging out with friends (and his cat, of course!).

Felix Van der Jeugt

Felix Van der Jeugt
R&D Engineer

Felix has always liked puzzles and problem solving. While studying Computer Science, he picked up a love for algorithms, programming languages and minimalism.

His fascination with nature got him doing a PhD in Computational Biology. Felix likes hiking and home brewing mead and wine.

Felix enjoys stories and books, especially fantasy and comedy, and ISO 8601 dates.

Lawrence Goossens

Lawrence Goossens
R&D Engineer

Lawrence has always been fascinated by algorithms, creating algorithms for games like connect-four long before learning how to write code.

These interests naturally led him to study computer science at Ghent university, where he enjoyed courses such as Algorithms and Data Structures, Compilers and Algorithmic Graph Theory. During his studies he also meddled in quantum computing for his master thesis.

While not working for Sigasi you will likely find him climbing or developing and playing videogames.

Michiel Derveeuw

Michiel Derveeuw
R&D Engineer

After having finished his Computer Science studies successfully, former intern Michiel decided to rejoin us as a full-time employee.

Michiel has always been fascinated by computers. At a young age he was already experimenting with Raspberry Pi’s, creating websites and programming chatbots.

Michiel has already had some working experience in several companies. He was most positive about the open and supporting spirit @ Sigasi.

Michiel spends his free time experimenting with roasting coffee, cooking, playing games and watching motorsport.

David Medina

David Medina
R&D Engineer

At 10 years old, David was always breaking the computer his dad gave him … just to be able to fix it again. Video games and electronic toys were fun! And so was opening them to see how they worked.

Compilers, computer architecture and electronics are what makes David tick. And so do machine learning and UX.

His love for cats and internet memes are equally big. He also loves cooking and baking, preferably with friends and a new kind of beer - of which there are plenty to discover in Belgium.

Titouan Vervack

Titouan Vervack
R&D Engineer

How come pixels move on the screen when I move my mouse? How do games work? Those were questions that sparked Titouan’s interest in computers at a young age.

This naturally led him to studies in Computer Science engineering, specializing in compilers and language design. This passion made him the fan of open-source and linux he is today.

But all work and no play is not how we roll: Titouan enjoys baking (and eating or sharing) cakes, playing badminton and climbing boulders with Lieven or Hendrik.

Mark Christiaens

Mark Christiaens
Head of Engineering

PET-scanning, data race detection, digital design, distributed backup, IDE design, cloud-scale storage, big data processing … a lifetime of varied and deeply-technical projects give Mark a unique insight in the technological landscape.

At Sigasi, Mark transitioned the first generation of our technology to the Xtext framework. Sigasi’s unconventional, technical, friendly atmosphere must be very addictive … since recently Mark rejoined the company to help it grow to the next level.

When Mark is not dabbling with interesting technology, he enjoys playing competitive chess and reading bedtime stories to his two kids.

Lieven Lemiengre

Lieven Lemiengre
Chief R&D Engineer

Lieven has built much of the internals of Sigasi Studio. He is an expert on Xtext, the framework on which the Sigasi Studio compiler is built.

Lieven is a regular speaker at international conferences about Eclipse and Xtext, for which he contributed both wild and crazy ideas and down-to-earth code patches. He also serves on the IEEE VHDL standardization committee, where he is continuously working on defining the next version of the VHDL language.

Dieter Therssen

Dieter Therssen
CEO

Dieter grew up in a warm home, either playing in the garden or in a couple of bands. Later came Basic, an airplane shooter game on Tandy TRS-80 and synthetic programming for a digital system simulator on HP-41CV. He still adores the scent of magnetic media.

Sigasi is a fast-growing, creative technology company in a B2B context and that’s a really nice fit for Dieter. Having worked in that space for several companies, and well-rooted in the field of semiconductors, Dieter forever enjoys the magic of a motivated team.

Outside of work, it’s cooking, jogging, gardening, and cycling. And little Manu with his adorable, welcoming smile.

You?

You?
Your future job

Sigasi is hiring! We are looking for talented engineers and other motivated colleagues to join our team.

Do you fancy Monday cake day? Enjoy teamwork?

Find out more here.


The founders of Sigasi

Philippe Faes

Philippe Faes
Founder

Fond of technology since childhood, Philippe was tinkering with his Commodore 64 computer, with Lego robots and —at age 17— getting his HAM radio license. He spent the following year studying in Portland, Oregon.

Back in Belgium, he graduated as a Computer Science Engineer at Ghent University, where he conducted his doctoral research at the Department of Electronics and Information Systems. Philippe holds a black belt in aikidō and enjoys teaching programming skills to grade schoolers.

Hendrik Eeckhaut

Hendrik Eeckhaut
Founder

At a very young age Hendrik was passionate about computers. When he was not breaking or fixing them, he was playing with his Legos or outside in the mud.

He started his engineering studies in 1996 at Ghent University and got his master degree in Computer Science. He performed research on artificial intelligence and on design methodology and received his PhD in Computer Science Engineering in 2008.

In his downtime Hendrik enjoys Belgian beers and the outdoors: cycling, running or working on his boulder climbing skills.


  • Our partners

    Xilinx uniquely enables applications that are both software defined and hardware optimized. These industry-leading devices are coupled with a next-generation design environment and IP to serve a broad range of customer needs.

    Sigasi is a proud member of the Xilinx Alliance Program.

  • Our partners

    Aldec, Inc. is an industry-leading Electronic Design Automation (EDA) company delivering innovative design creation, simulation and verification solutions to assist in the development of complex FPGA, ASIC, SoC and embedded system designs.

    Sigasi is a proud partner of the Aldec Unite Program.

  • Our partners

    Intel Corporation (formerly Altera Corporation) is at the forefront of technology innovation, providing customers programmable solutions for leading-edge electronic systems that are shaping our modern world.

    Sigasi is a proud member of the Altera® Commitment to Cooperative Engineering Solutions (ACCESS) program.

  • Our partners

    Eclipse is a community for individuals and organizations who wish to collaborate on commercially-friendly open source software. Originally created by IBM, now the Eclipse Foundation is an independent non-profit corporation. With its core technology built on the Eclipse platform.

    Sigasi is a proud member of the Eclipse Foundation and the Eclipse IDE Working Group.

  • Our partners

    The Electronic System Design Alliance, an international association of companies providing goods and services throughout the semiconductor design ecosystem, is a forum to address technical, marketing, economic and legislative issues affecting the entire industry.

    Sigasi is a proud member of the ESD Alliance.