Vaughn Betz

[Me]
Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto
NSERC/Altera Industrial Research Chair in Programmable Silicon

Research Interests

Recent News

  • I am admitting graduate students for the Sept. 2013 session -- please contact me if you are interested in joining my research group.
  • Prof. Betz is the Program Chair for the ACM International Symposium on FPGAs, to be held in Monterey, CA Feb. 11 - 13, 2013. Please see the the conference website for details. In addition to two days of new research results, we will have a day of tutorials, focused on new design flows and tools, on Feb. 11. Hope to see you there!
  • Congratulations to Jeff Cassidy on the acceptance of his paper on his new high-performance light simulation tool, FullMonte, at the upcoming SPIE Photonoics west conference. We plan to build on this work to improve light-based cancer treatment therapies by better modeling light traveling through human tissue.
  • Congratulations to Mohamed Abdelfattah on the acceptance at the FPT conference of his paper investigating how FPGAs could be modified to incorporate a packet-switched Network-on-Chip "backplane" for communication.
  • Drs. Rose, Anderson and myself have been awarded a Semiconductor Research Corporation grant to investigate FPGA fabrics which can be embedded in a larger System on a Chip. There are many exciting areas for investigation; one area I am particularly interested in is how we could make embedded FPGAs using ASIC-compatible tools, flows and circuit designs. This will lead to some efficiency loss in the programmable fabric, but could make integration of an embedded FPGA much easier and more practical in a SoC.
  • I recently became the NSERC/Altera Industrial Research Chair in Programmable Silicon. Press release Faculty News
  • A panel of experts has chosen the FPGA 20: the twenty-five most influential papers from 20 years of the International FPGA Symposium. Six of my papers are included in the FPGA 25. Read more on the University of Toronto's impact in the FPGA 20 (and the FPGA industry) here.
  • I recently co-chaired the FPGA 2012 workshop, which was on "FPGAs in 2032: Opportunities and Challenges for the Next 20 Years." Seven visionaries from industry and academia shared their thoughts, leading to a very interesting set of presentations and discussion. See the slides and video here.
    Contact Info
    Research Interests
    Biography and CV
    Publications
    Research and Design Students
    Teaching
    Free Software, including VPR and EasyGL
    The FPGA Place-and-Route Challenge: a contest for the FPGA community - compare your routing area against the best achieved so far