Panel Discussion: The Future of FCCMs Beyond Mooreโs Law
Chris Lavin has been working on open source FPGA backend CAD for the past decade at Xilinx and now AMD. He is the technical lead for the RapidWright project and loves to make things go fast. Prior to Xilinx, Chris worked at Tabula. Chris received the PhD degree in electrical engineering from Brigham Young University and lives in Colorado with his wife and four children.
George A. Constantinides is Professor of Digital Computation and Director of the Early Career Researcher Institute at Imperial College London. He enjoys playing games, the geekier the better. Some of his favourite games include finding weird and wonderful ways to design FPGA computational hardware and algebraic play, but he also likes more classical games like Magic: The Gathering and RPGs. He also enjoys coffee. He has been interested in FPGAs ever since 1995 when he first got a summer job writing a behavioral model for a Xilinx XC6216 device.
Madhura Purnaprajna is currently at AMD (Xilinx), where she looks at performance projections for next-gen AMD (Xilinx) ACAP devices. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Heinz Nixdorf Institute, University of Paderborn, Germany. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow with an International Research Fellowship from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemenischaft) and MHV Fellowship (SNSF), at the Processor Architecture Lab, EPFL, Switzerland, and the High-performance Computing Lab, Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru, Bengaluru. She is on a sabbatical from her position as a Professor with the Department of Electronics and Communication, PES University, Bengaluru. Her research interests are in reconfigurable computing and open source processor architectures.
Mark Shand holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Sydney (1988) and a Master of Optical Science from the University of Arizona (2022). He held research positions at Digital Equipment Corporation, Compaq and Hewlett Packard, in Paris France and Palo Alto California. His work in this period was primarily focused on efficient computation but led to contributions in astronomical instrumentation for the Swedish Vacuum Solar Telescope and scalable visualization systems for the DoE’s ASCI/VIEWS program. In 2006 he joined LetItWave, a fabless semiconductor startup that developed video processing technology. LetItWave was acquired by Zoran in 2008 which lead to Zoran’s line of Frame Rate Conversion SoCs. He joined Google in 2012 where he worked initially on Google Glass, focusing on the display and camera subsystems. In 2015 he transitioned to working on sensor systems for autonomous driving technology as part of the project which became Waymo LLC in 2017. Since 2017 he has served as an expert on IEC TC76 Optical radiation safety and laser equipment. He is a member of ACM, IEEE and SPIE.
Martin Langhammer has been at Altera for over 25 years on a number of different technologies, including FPGA Architecture, CPU Architecture, Computer Arithmetic, and applications of Information Theory. He has over 260 Issued US Patents and about 55 peer-reviewed papers. He is currently finishing on a PhD in Computer Engineering at Imperial College London. Coincidentally, his PhD supervisor George A. Constantinides is also on this panel.