ECE Department
University of Minnesota
Research Area
Computer-Aided Design, FPGAs
Area of Expertise
Field-programmable gate arrays, Computer-aided design of VLSI circuits and systems
Education
Ph.D., 2000, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States
M.S., 1998, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States
B.S., CS, 1996, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
Honors and Awards
National Science Foundation CAREER award, 2003
Research Interests
My research interests are primarily in the field of VLSI-CAD. They include FPGA physical design, reconfigurable computing, and ASIC floorplanning/placement. I do some FPGA designs as well. In the past couple of years, I have focused on Stochastic Computing, which uses an analog-like encoding scheme: numbers are represented by streams of 1’s and 0’s. The ratio of 1’s to the length of the stream shows the value as a “probability”. Simple logic can perform complex operations on stochastic streams (e.g., an AND gate can multiply two probabilities).
Advances in the FPGA technology have made them increasingly more powerful in the past decade, and their market share is increasing every year. The main reason for their popularity is their flexibility in changing designs without having to go through more fabrication cycles. However, the performance, power, and area efficiency of FPGAs lags behind their ASIC counterparts. My objective is to bridge the gap between ASICs and FPGAs by devising better architectures, CAD algorithms, and programming paradigms.
