Brief Biography

Dr. Betz is an Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, and holds the NSERC/Intel Industrial Research Chair in Programmable Silicon. He is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Fellow, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and a Faculty Affiliate of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. His research interests cover VLSI design and computer architecture (particularly FPGA and related programmable device architecture), Computer-Aided Design algorithms, and methods of accelerating deep learing inference using parallelism and hardware acceleration.

The VPR toolset and methodology developed by Dr. Betz have become the standard for FPGA architecture research and the comparison point for CAD optimization quality, and have been used by over 180 companies and 1100 universities. Dr. Betz co-founded Right Track CAD to commercialize his research in 1998 and over the next two years helped grow the company to 10 engineers and several million dollars in yearly revenue. In 2000, Right Track CAD was acquired by one of its customers, Altera Corporation (a fortune 500 semiconductor company). Dr. Betz held several leadership positions within Altera over the next 11 years, ultimately as Senior Director of Software Engineering leading a team of 90 engineers. He is the architect of many features within Altera's Quartus CAD system, including the placement and routing engine and the power optimization tools, and these tools are used daily by tens of thousands of design engineers worldwide. He is also one of the architects of the Stratix and Cyclone FPGA families, which have cumulative sales of over $15 billion US to date.

Dr. Betz holds 102 US patents, and has received 16 best or most significant paper awards from top conferences in the field. Six of his publications are included in the "FPGA20" most influential FPGA Symposium papers, and two of his publications are included in the "FPL25" most significant papers from the International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications. He is the author of one book and four book chapters on programmable logic and CAD and has received best paper awards from the FPGA Symposium, the International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), the International Conference on Field-Configurable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM), and the International Conference on Field Prorammable Technology (FPT).

Dr. Betz completed his PhD(ECE) at the University of Toronto and received both the Governor General's Award for best PhD thesis and the Douglas R. Colton Award for Research Excellence. He received his M.S. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993, and his B.Sc. (with University Gold Medal) from the University of Manitoba in 1991.

My Curriculum Vitae

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