About Alienonyx

Alienonyx, Inc. is a fabless semiconductor company developing cryogenic analog and mixed-signal ASICs, beginning with integrated readout for superconducting single-photon detector arrays. We pair deep memory-circuit and mixed-signal design experience with a fully in-house silicon design flow on open tooling — the same economics that make small-volume silicon a real business — and a conviction that the quantum and superconducting-detector industry deserves components, not just publications.

Founder

Alienonyx was founded by Ali Al-Shamma, an analog and mixed-signal integrated-circuit designer with nearly three decades of experience across the memory and semiconductor industry — including senior design roles at Intel, Western Digital, SanDisk, AMD, and Matrix Semiconductor. His work spans sense amplifiers, data converters, precision references, on-chip power and clock generation, and compute-in-memory and neuromorphic circuits, and he has led test-chip IP design and first-silicon bring-up. Reading a memory cell is the same discipline SNSPD readout demands — discriminating a small, fast analog signal against a reference, at speed and at scale, in silicon that has to work inside someone else’s product. He is a named inventor on more than 50 U.S. patents and patent applications in memory and mixed-signal design, has published at ISSCC, and holds an MSc and BSc in Electrical Engineering from Santa Clara University.

The readout architecture is patent-pending.