OSCAR 2022 - Invited Talks

Talk Title: Open-source silicon development as an enabler for novel computer architecture research.
Shashank Nemawarkar

Computational needs of applications such as machine learning are increasing in orders of magnitude while node scaling provides small percentage improvements per year. Proof-of-concepts (PoCs) with key architectural ideas and a known set of system IPs demonstrate power, performance, and area (PPA) benefits better than a full custom designed support IPs. Development of support designs in addition to the focus of research may also be beyond the strength of many architectural teams.

Open-source approach to silicon development provides a push for innovation by helping research and commercial teams focus on their custom designs while reusing on the building block IPs from the ecosystem. Such a reuse is also helpful for incremental development for software stack to go with the hardware. These research ideas can be developed and implemented where they benefit the most in the architecture from large data centers through small IoT devices.

This talk focuses on a spectrum of technologies from GlobalFoundries and a suite of IPs and tools from the proprietary and open-source ecosystem can be used to explore novel architecture ideas and create silicon designs to test power, performance, and area efficiencies on their applications.

Bio:
Shashank Nemawarkar is the Director of Computing Systems Architectures at GlobalFoundries focusing on AI/ML and compute applications. He holds a Ph.D. degree from McGill University, an M.Tech. degree from IIT Kanpur and a B.E.(Hons) degree from BITS Pilani. His role at GF encompasses applications through system-on-chip implementations of the spectrum of processor, controller, and accelerator architectures for power, performance, and area optimizations by bringing the architecture and design research concepts closer to the technology and foundry offerings. He has architected and designed processors for server (IBM) and mobile (Samsung) markets, network processors (LSI) and storage controllers (Seagate), leading to over 35 granted or filed patents in these products.