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Friday, November 7, 2008
The Mover
Robins’ choice of ICs over ERs leads to ChipWrights
By Amy Castor, Special to Mass High Tech
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Growing up as a kid in Michigan, Cary Robins was interested in both science and technology. He briefly considered going into medicine until his older brother who was in med school brought him to see the cadavers. It was a deciding moment.
“I knew I didn’t want to do that,” said Robins, the newly appointed president of ChipWrights Inc., a fabless semiconductor company in Bedford.
So he went off to pursue a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan instead. “I think I got the engineering advice from a teacher,” Robins said. “He knew I was good at physics and math and said that EE was a good place to be.”
It certainly was for Robins. His coursework allowed him to satisfy a growing curiosity with the early Apple Macintoshes and IBM PCs of the time. He got a chance to study them and how they were built, from silicon chip to hard drive.
When he graduated, it seemed everyone in high-tech was flocking to San Francisco, but Robins thought the East Coast sounded more interesting.
“I wanted to do something different,” he said. “I took a job with Raytheon because I was interested in Boston, not the other way around.” Wanting to live as close to the city possible, he and his wife found an apartment in Allston.
After 10 years working on “military stuff” at Raytheon Co. and later at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Robins went to work for the commercial sector and eventually co-founded Top Layer Networks Inc. in Westborough with six other engineers. “That was an exciting time,” said Robins. “It was the early days of the tech bubble. There were lots of startups, and we were all taking off.”
He got lured away from Top Layer when a longtime friend from Lincoln Labs called to tell him about some “cool technology” in the cable TV space coming out of Lexington-based Chinook Communications. Robins took the hook, and came on board as director of hardware engineering.
“I got to come in right at the beginning just like I did at Top Layer, hire up a big team, and build the infrastructure of the company, which is something I really enjoy doing,” said Robins. “But then the tech market crashed and we ended up shutting our doors because there were very few customers in that space. A lot of startups died in that period after 9/11.”
Robins joined ChipWrights as an ASIC architect in 2002. A string of promotions pulled him straight into upper management. “I like steering the ship,” he said about his new role as president. “I’ve always thought the best high-tech managers were the ones who understood the technology.”
Amy Castor is a freelance writer in Amherst.
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