In 1998 I completed my Phd in ECE at the University of Toronto. My research consisted of developing a new placement, routing and architecture evaluation CAD tool (Versatile Place and Route, or VPR) and devising logic block and routing architectures which improve the speed and density of FPGAs. I received both the Governor General's Gold Medal and the Douglas R. Colton Medal for Research Excellence for my PhD work, and the VPR toolset and methodology has been very widely adopted by subsequent research.
I co-founded Right Track CAD in 1998 to commercialize VPR. One of our initial customers was Altera, which replaced their internal placement and routing technology with Right Track's. In 2000, Altera acquired Right Track CAD. From 2000 to 2011, I held a series of increasingly senior positions within Altera, eventually becoming Senior Director, Software Engineering. I helped grow the Altera Toronto site from approximately 15 engineers to 90 engineers, and was the director of the entire site from 2007 to 2011. My contributions have included the experimental flow used by Altera to evaluate new FPGA architectures, the Quartus II placement and routing engine, the timing, power and signal integrity analysis engines within Quartus, and many of the techniques used in our high-speed memory interface (e.g. 800 MHz DDR3) Intellectual Property cores. I am also one of the architects of the Stratix series of FPGAs. Finally, I drove the creation of the Quartus University Interface Program (QUIP), which has allowed academic researchers to test their ideas by incorporating them into a full-featured industrial CAD flow.
I hold 68 U.S. patents, am the co-author of 1 book and 2 book chapters on FPGAs, and numerous other technical publications.
Aside from FPGAs and CAD, my other main research interests are computer architecture and VLSI design, particularly microprocessor, memory and graphics subsystem architecture.
Earlier in my career I spent time writing both commercial and academic electromagnetic field solvers, ranging from solvers for high-speed circuit boards to a program to analyze the half-mile tall antennas used to communicate with submerged submarines.
I received my M.S. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993, and my B.Sc. from the University of Manitoba in 1991, from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in each case.