- About Us
Engineering Intelligence, Built for Real RF Workflows
Design Forge is the design intelligence platform for electromagnetic simulation engineering. We capture the expert knowledge your team creates every day — the design decisions, workflow intuition, and hard-won reasoning that live nowhere else — and turn it into a structured, compounding asset your entire organization can build on.
- Our Story
How Design Forge Started
Design Forge was born from a simple observation: the most
valuable knowledge in RF and electromagnetic engineering has
never been captured. It lives in senior engineers’ heads — the
design intuition, workflow judgment, and hard-won expertise
built over decades of simulation-driven practice.
Textbooks teach theory. Tool documentation describes features.
But nobody has built the system that captures how expert
engineers actually make design decisions — and why. That’s
what Design Forge is building, starting with HFSS.
Our Mission
To capture, structure, and preserve the tacit design
knowledge that expert engineers create every day — turning institutional expertise into a lasting, compounding
organizational asset. We believe the future of engineering AI isn’t smarter models. It’s captured human expertise.
Our Vision
A future where no organization loses critical design intelligence when an engineer retires, changes roles, or moves on. Where every design decision builds on the validated experience of the team. Where engineering expertise deploys and compounds across projects, teams, and generations.
- Core Values
What We Believe In
Principles that guide how we build the design intelligence
platform for electromagnetic simulation engineering.
Engineering First
We build for engineers who solve real problems with simulation. Domain accuracy, technical rigor, and respect for engineering judgment come before any AI feature.
Practical Simplicity
Powerful tools should disappear into existing workflows, not add complexity. If it creates a documentation burden, we've failed.
User Control
Engineers remain fully in control of every design decision. DF captures and preserves expertise — it never overrides it.
Transparency by Design
No black boxes. Engineers can see what was captured, what was inferred, and why. Trust is built on visibility.
Your Data, Your Intelligence
Customers own everything they create — every workflow, every annotation, every insight. We win by being indispensable, not inescapable.
Integrity & Trust
We build technology engineers can rely on — robust, maintainable, and dependable over time.
- Meet the Team
Built by Engineers and Technologists
Design Forge is built by a multidisciplinary team with experience in RF engineering, software development, and applied AI. We focus on building tools engineers can trust — in production environments, not demos.
Christopher Marki
Co-Founder and CEO
An expert in MMIC, thin film, and hybrid manufacturing technologies, he has developed numerous commercially successful RF components and ICs. He is also the CEO of Marki Microwave . His work spans high-frequency mm-wave packaging and RF design flow optimization using AI/Machine Learning. Christopher holds a PhD in Photonics from UC San Diego and a BSEE from Duke University.
Ariel Pena-Martinez
Co-Founder and CTO
A seasoned data scientist with over seven years of experience, specializing in artificial intelligence, with prior experience at Meta. He holds an MBA from Boston University, a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering, and dual bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, along with AWS and Databricks certifications. He is also the author of Unshackled: A Cuban’s Journey to Freedom
Engineering Talent Gap
Source: SIA/Oxford Economics, 2023
Knowledge At Risk
Source: Derived from SIA report
GLOBAL COMPETITION FOR EXPERTISE
Source: CSIS / China Semiconductor Industry Association