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Chief Architect, SiFive
Krste Asanović is a professor in the EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). He received a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1998 then joined the faculty at MIT, receiving tenure in 2005, before returning to join the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2007. His main research areas are computer architecture, VLSI design, parallel programming and operating system design. He is currently director of the UC Berkeley ASPIRE lab tackling the challenge of improving computational efficiency now that transistor scaling is ending. He leads the free RISC-V ISA project at UC Berkeley, serves as chairman of RISC-V International, and cofounded SiFive Inc. to support commercial use of RISC-V processors. He received the NSF CAREER award, and is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and an IEEE Fellow.
Distinguished Engineer, Google
David Patterson is likely best-known for the book Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, written with John Hennessy and for the UC Berkeley research projects Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC), Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), and Network of Workstations (NOW). He also served as UC Berkeley’s Computer Science Division chair, the Computing Research Association chair, and president of the Association for Computing Machinery. Additionally, David was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and shared the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award with Hennessy.
Executive Director & Co-Founder, Syntacore
Alexander is Executive Director and co-founder at Syntacore. Prior to establishing Syntacore in 2015, Alexander had more than 15 years of experience in semiconductor industry in senior engineering and management roles, including more than 12 years at Intel R&D, where he contributed both to the number of research projects and volume semiconductor products development. Alexander’s research interests are future SoC architectures and heterogeneous platforms with specific focus on emerging workloads analysis and acceleration.
Founder and CEO, Ventana Micro Systems
Balaji Baktha is founder and CEO of Ventana Micro Systems. He is an experienced semiconductor executive and serial technology entrepreneur and investor with a proven track record of over 30 years in Silicon Valley. Prior to Ventana, Balaji was founder and CEO of Veloce Technologies, the world’s first 64-bit ARM based high performance processor for cloud compute, networking, storage and embedded applications, which was subsequently acquired by AppliedMicro. Before Veloce, Balaji was the VP and GM of the Communications Business at Marvell Semiconductor. Before Marvell, Balaji co-founded Platys, a startup that pioneered iSCSI and was subsequently acquired by Adaptec (now Microsemi). Balaji is a Board Member of several startups, and a Limited Partner and Senior Advisor at several PE and venture funds.
Vice President of Customer Solutions Engineering, Intel Foundry Services at Intel Corporation
Bob Brennan is Vice President of Customer Solutions Engineering for Intel Foundry Services at Intel Corporation. He is responsible for leading the delivery of end-to-end design solutions to help IFS customers use Intel’s portfolio of unique IPs and design technology in their product designs. This responsibility covers the entire design life cycle for customers, from customer design architecture to the strategic selection of Intel IP to platform enablement, as well as design services support for SoC integration including validation and debug support. In his previous role, Bob served as Vice President of Emerging Memory & System at Micron, where he managed product, design, and engineering teams to accelerate the delivery of new designs on new technologies. Bob also served as Senior Vice President of Memory Solutions Lab at Samsung, where he established an Enterprise SSD product line, delivered Samsung’s first revenue software product while continuing an active role in architecture development. Prior to these roles, Bob spent 22 years at Intel serving in various senior technical positions, including Server Architecture, Laptop Architecture, Mobile SoC Architecture, and CPU Core Design, Verification and Architecture.
Founder & Managing Partner, Chengwei Capital
Eric Li is a venture capitalist in Shanghai. He is founder and managing partner of Chengwei Capital. He also serves on the boards of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He is a trustee of Fudan University’s China Institute and chairman of its advisory council, a trustee of Asia Society Hong Kong, and a member of the Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), which organizes the annual Shangri-La Dialogue. He received his B.A. in economics from University of California, Berkeley, his MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, and his Ph.D. in political science from Fudan University.
Co-Founder, Stream Computing
Shawn is the co-founder of Stream Computing Inc. which is a startup company using RISC-V ISA to develop high power-efficiency and programmable DSA AI Processor.
He has 20 years of experience in the IC industry, covering the entire process of IC architecture, design, verification and implementation, as well as rich Product development, project and team management experience.
He led the his team complete the cumulative shipment of more than 300 million mobile phone chips, mass production of a 400mm2 server CPU based on Samsung’s 10nm process, and Successfully taped out a cloud AI inference chip based on TSMC’s 12nm process in Stream Computing Inc.
President & Co-founder, Andes Technology
Frankwell Lin is the President and co-founder of Andes Technology, which is a leading supplier of high efficiency, low-power 32/64-bit RISC-V processor cores. Frankwell received BSEE degree of Electrophysics from the National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan, and MSEE degree of Electrical and Computer Engineering from Portland State University, Oregon, USA. Before Andes Technology, he was the spokesperson and board member of Farady, a leading fabless ASIC and silicon IP provider. He also led ASIC business development as starting, then on-and-off leading ASIC implementation, chip backend service, IP business development, industry relationship development (IR) in Faraday. Under his management, Andes Technology has been recognized as one of leading suppliers of embedded CPU IP in semiconductor industry. Andes also won the reputation of leading technology company with awards such like 2012 EE Times worldwide Silicon 60 Hot Startups to Watch, 2015 the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific award, etc. In 2015, President Lin received accolade award of Outstanding Technology Management Performance, Taiwan, for his contribution to the high-tech industry. In parallel to contribution in the industry, he also contributes time and effort in social service for technology evolution. He is Chairman of TEIA (Taiwan Embedded Industry Alliance) from 2010 to 2012. TEIA is a non-profit organization to promote embedded system innovation as well as embedded system value chain engineering talent training, including embedded software, hardware, IP, application, international promotion channel, etc.
Vice President of Hardware Engineering, NVIDIA
Frans Sijstermans earned his MSc degree in Computer Science from the Eindhoven University of Technology in 1985. He worked as a researcher at Philips in The Netherlands and Palo Alto, USA, until 1998. After that he held various managerial positions at Philips Semiconductors, TriMedia, and Equator. He joined NVIDIA in 2004, where he is responsible for all RISC-V processors, security IP, video codecs, camera & display controllers, vision & DL accelerators, and GSYNC products. He has been active in the open source community as a member of the inaugural board of the RISC-V foundation and the Alliance for Open Media. Also, his team open sourced NVDLA, NVIDIA’s inferencing accelerator.
Director of Operations, Haihe Laboratory of Information Technology Application
Dr. Henry He is the Director of Operations of Haihe Laboratory of Information Technology Application. He used to be a processor R & D engineer and worked in the field of computer architecture for more than ten years. At present, he is engaged in some management work, and responsible for the marketing management that includes product planning, technical planning and marketing strategy. He likes making friends and singing.
Director, Computer Sciences Research Department, Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Jesús Labarta received a B.S. in Telecommunications Engineering from the Technical University of Catalunya (UPC) in 1981 and his Ph.D. in Telecommunications Engineering also from UPC in 1983. He is full professor of Computer Architecture at UPC since 1990 and was Director of CEPBA-European Center of Parallelism at Barcelona from 1996 to 2005. Since its creation in 2005, he has been the Director of the Computer Sciences Research Department within the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). During his 35-year academic career, Prof. Labarta has made significant contributions in programming models and performance analysis tools for parallel, multicore and accelerated systems, with the sole objective of helping application programmers to improve their understanding of their applications performance and to improve programming productivity in the transition towards very large-scale systems. Under his supervision, his research team has been developing performance analysis and prediction tools (Paraver and Dimemas) and pioneering research on how to increase the intelligence embedded in these performance tools.
Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder, Rivos Inc.
Mark Hayter is Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder of Rivos Inc. For the previous 11 years he was Senior Engineering Director in the Chrome OS Hardware team at Google. His team developed new technologies for Chromebooks, produced reference implementations and worked with OEMs to bring them to market. Prior to that he was involved in systems architecture at several semiconductor companies, being VP of Systems Engineering at P.A. Semi, Inc. (acquired by Apple Inc.), Senior Manager of Hardware Systems Engineering at Broadcom Corporation and System Architect at SiByte, Inc. Earlier, Hayter was at the Digital Equipment Corporation Systems Research Center. Hayter holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.
R&D Director, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
Mr. Matthew Leung’s main duties lie on the development of next generation processor technologies. His expertise and experience lies in the fields of VLSI design for advanced communication chipsets, microprocessors and artificial intelligence. Mr. Leung received his BSc and MSc degrees of Electrical Engineering in University of Michigan and Stanford University respectively. Before joining Huawei, he worked in Marvell Semiconductor, ASTRI, Sun Microsystems, Apple Computer, etc.
Chief Technologist & Founder, VRULL GmbH
Dr. Philipp Tomsich is the Chief Technologist and Founder of VRULL, an engineering consultancy focused on building, enabling, and optimizing the software ecosystems for next-generation silicon solutions.
Engineering Director, Seagate Technology
Richard Bohn is an Engineering Director at Seagate Technology, the global leader in data storage solutions. A 16-year silicon industry veteran, Richard has led Seagate’s RISC-V efforts since 2015. Prior to his current role Richard held a number of technical leadership and design positions. He began his career at IBM in processor design. Passionate about the role of open standards and technology, Richard sits on the OpenTitan Technical Committee and Seagate’s Open Source Program Office core team. Richard received a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
Professor, Munich University of Applied Sciences
Stefan is a professor at Munich University of Applied Sciences. He is a long term advocate and active member of the open source silicon community, most prominent in his role as director of the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation (FOSSi Foundation). He has been active in various RISC-V projects over the last six years. Stefan was involved in the debug task group and has recently become chair of the RISC-V SIG “Academia & Education”.
Technical Fellow, Microchip
Ted Speers is a Technical Fellow at Microchip’s FPGA BU, where he is responsible for defining its roadmap for low power, secure, reliable FPGAs and SoC FPGAs. Ted is a RISC-V leader and evangelist and has served on the Board of Directors of RISC-V International since its inception in 2016. He joined Actel (now part of Microchip) in 1987 and held roles in process engineering and product engineering before assuming his current role in 2003. He is co-inventor on 35 U.S. patents. In his role, Ted has consistently defined first of it’s kind products, the most recent example being PolarFireSoC, the first RISC-V based SoC FPGA. Prior to joining Actel, he worked at LSI Logic. Ted has a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering from Cornell.
CEO, Guangdong StarFive Technology
Thomas Xu has a B.S. from Fudan University and M.S. from University of New Mexico, with a total of 26 years’ experience in semiconductor industry, more than 15 years’ experience in management and entrepreneurship. Senior specialist at semiconductor industry and entrepreneur. Mr. Xu spent 11 years in research and development of processors in Hewlett Packard, co-developed the processor of PA-RISC and Itanium, and was CEO of Polaris Microelectronics, CEO at Brite Semiconductor, VP of Marketing & Sales at C-sky, GM of C-Sky Shanghai company.
Vice President, UNISOC
Xiaofei Xia is the vice president of UNISOC. He is responsible for the marketing management that includes product planning, technical planning and marketing strategy. Previously, he worked for Huawei and had led in-house chipset platform planning for flagship smartphones since the first generation. In Huawei, he also pioneered the network and device chipset technical co-innovation with major Europe operators.
Vice President, Alibaba Group
Xiaoning Qi is the Vice President of Alibaba Group. Previously, he held senior management and technical positions in companies such as Intel, designing integrated circuits and systems. He sits on the board of directors at several other international organizations including CHIPS Alliance, EEMBC, etc. He has published more than fifty technical papers, a book, and has delivered over three dozen invited talks. He also holds two US patents. Xiaoning received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
Chief Scientist, Beijing Institute of Open Source Chip
Yungang Bao is a Professor of Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the director of Research Center of Advanced Computer Systems (ACS) of ICT-CAS. Prof. Bao founded China RISC-V Alliance (CRVA) and serves as the secretary-general of CRVA. His research interests include computer architecture and computer systems. His research work such as Labeled von Neumann Architecture (LvNA), Hybrid Memory Trace Tool (HMTT), Partition-Based DMA Cache and PARSEC 3.0 has been adopted by the industry including Alibaba, Huawei, Intel and the research community. He was a plenary keynote speaker at China National Computer Congress (CNCC) in 2016 and was invited to give a keynote presentation at ARM Research Summit 2018. He was the winner of CCF-Intel Young Faculty Award of the year for 2013. He won CCF-IEEE CS Young Computer Scientist Award and China’s National Lofty Honor for Youth under 40 of the year for 2019.
Co-Director, RIOS Laboratory
Dr. Zhangxi Tan is a co-director of the RISC-V International Open-source Laboratory (RIOS), leading open-source IP and software development that helps the RISC-V ecosystem world-class. Dr. Tan is an adjunct professor at Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI). He received his PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley in 2013. He is specialized in computer architecture and VLSI designs. After graduating from Berkeley, he joined Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG) as a Founding Engineer serving as a lead designer for Pure’s award winning FlashBlade product, which generates hundreds of million-dollar revenues every year and have many high-profile customers. Dr. Tan holds more than 20 US patents in flash storage systems and hardware accelerators. He also founded several startup companies in Silicon Valley and China in the chip design industry.
We send occasional news about RISC-V technical progress, news, and events.