Dr Wainwright received his PhD in Electronic Engineering from the University of Liverpool. After some time in various academic and industrial roles he joined Microsemi Corporation where he reached the role of Vice President and become the General Manager of the High Reliability Group which supplied components worldwide to high reliability applications, especially space. Microsemi was since acquired and became Microchip. Simon left Microsemi and remained in the US where he co-founded and was President & CEO of Freebird Semiconductor revolutionising the space components market by introducing Gallium Nitride (GaN) components into the space industry the initial product line has hundreds of thousands of hours of space heritage in many different applications. After his exit Freebird Semiconductor was later to became EPC Space. Since then Simon returned to Europe to bring up his family. Amongst other activities he has now become CEO of Semi Zabala, a company based in San Sebastian, Northern Spain, dedicated to the design, production and testing of the next generation of GaN devices for space. Based upon extensive experience in both the space components industry and the technological area of Gallium Nitride the goal of Semi Zabala is to produce a fully integrated GaN component company, based on an exclusively European supply chain, to cover all space power management applications.