Andrew Hsu — extended biography

With a lifelong passion to improve user experiences and communicate technical concepts to the general public, Andrew brings over two decades of technical marketing and product leadership in consumer electronics to Abacus Semi. Prior to Abacus, he pioneered the development and mass market adoption of touch interface solutions for mobile devices. At Synaptics, Inc., he was on the team that designed and launched the world’s first single-chip touch controller. Andrew also invented the touchscreen for mobile devices and then led the efforts to productize the touchscreen &endash; creating initial prototypes, evaluation kits, customer demos and reference designs.

Simultaneously, Andrew led the company’s technical marketing efforts in the laptop computer and mobile devices market, authoring numerous articles and serving as technical spokesperson at industry, media, and IR events. The relentless media and customer outreach on the technical and usability advantages of capacitive touch led to a dominant market share for touchpads in laptop computers, then adoption of touch input for portable media players, and then the adoption of touchscreen for modern phones, fueling Synaptics’ revenue growth to over $1 billion. More importantly, it set the standard for user interaction in today’s half-trillion dollar smartphone industry.

Following the mainstream adoption of touchscreens, Andrew directed Synaptics’s concept prototyping team to further investigate novel user interface technologies for improving the user experience. The team designed and delivered over 100 high-fidelity prototype systems which Andrew showcased to non-technical audiences. These prototypes helped introduce interaction technologies that are now considered mainstream such as dynamic screen icons, haptics, force, fingerprint ID, eye-tracking, and voice. Following Synaptics, Andrew joined the VR/XR start-up Manomotion in a business development role and then managed NPI development at start-up Sensel for their haptics touchpad platforms.

Andrew holds multiple patents and is recipient of the 2010 Mobile Entertainment Forum’s Outstanding Contribution Award as inventor of the mobile touchscreen.

Andrew received his PhD in Computational Neuroscience and a Masters in Computer Science, both from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology.

In his free time, Andrew is a competitive road bicyclist and transportation advocate. He also helps lead a Scout troop, focusing on teaching outdoor skills.