Ph: (650) 283-9142
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Ph: (650) 283-9142
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Computer architecture, low power processors and embedded systems, power estimation and modeling, perception, media and streaming architectures, VLSI design, compiler and CAD algorithms, operating systems and networking
| Ph.D in Computer Science, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT |
May 2004
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| Dissertation: The Perception Processor | |
| Thesis Advisor: Prof. Al Davis |
| MS in Computer Science, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT |
January 2000
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| Thesis: Parallel Vector Access: A Technique for Improving Memory System Performance | |
| Thesis Advisors: Prof. Al Davis, Prof. Sally A. McKee |
| B. Tech in Computer Science, University of Kerala, India |
June 1991 - October 1995
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| Thesis: Design and Implementation of a Micro-kernel Operating System | |
| Thesis Advisor: Prof. Frahad Musadeekh |
Founder of Satva Design Automation / Innovator (Post-doctoral
Researcher), Siemens Technology-To-Business Center, Berkeley
April 2005-Present
In April 2005, I started an EDA company named Satva Design Automation with Siemens as the angel investor. (http://www.satvad.com). I lead a three member research and development group investigating rapid ASIC and SoC design using customized stream processors. We are currently experiencing difficulties on settling equity/ownership with Siemens and I am looking for another position. My current role involves research and development in processor architecture, optimizing parametrized compilers, automated design exploration, hardware generation etc. I am also responsible for project management, business plans, negotiating with external vendors and investors, contracts, incorporation, etc.
Development tasks included analysis of embedded applications, design of application specific processors, compilers and tool chains, integrating design exploration and heuristic optimization with Verilog interpreters, GUIs, code generators etc. I had to deal with pretty much every aspect of computer science in this project from writing parsers, genetic algorithms, industrial automation code etc. to XML and bug fixes contributed for the Firefox/Mozilla web browser.
As a part of this project we used our stream processor technology
to prototype a PLC processor design. Under my direction, my three
member team has designed and implemented a custom RISC processor for
industrial automation in a 
CMOS process and developed a compiler
that performs binary translation from the legacy instruction set to
the new instruction set. We have implemented from scratch everything
from the front-end that lexes and parses the STL language to dominators,
dataflow analysis, SSA conversion, graph-coloring register allocation,
optimization passes etc. Siemens A&D in Germany is the world leader
in PLC processors used for industrial automation. Our PLC design if
carried forward will become the heart of a PLC product line with annual
sales exceeding $1.5 billion.
Post-doctoral Scholar, CVA Group, Stanford University
July 2004-April 2005
Research in Stream Processing, Scheduling and on-chip memory allocation,
Energy-delay optimization of low-power media processors. Design of
an inverse square root floating point unit for the Merrimac Streaming
Supercomputer. Development work on the simulator for the Imagine/Merrimac
stream processors. Simulation studies and simulator development to
compare IBM Cell, MIT RAW and Stanford Merrimac/Imagine. Automated
floor plan generator for stream processors. Mathematical work on the
theory of space and time scheduling. Job responsibilities also included
writing research grants and providing consulting for a research group
of 12 doctoral students.
Research Assistant, Architecture Group, School of Computing,
University of Utah
August 1997-July 2004
Processor design:
Designed and implemented a power efficient VLIW processor for a variety of perception, and streaming tasks in 0.25u and 0.13u CMOS processes. Developed tools for the automatic generation of domain-specific stream processors that can accelerate the performance of a variety of perception algorithms at low power budgets. Developed a compiler to transform GCC compiler intermediate code to micro-code. Designed a synthesizable low-power MIPS processor similar to the R4600. Ported Linux to this processor, modified GCC and GNU binutils. Performance analysis of speech recognition and computer vision applications. Originated the concept and contributed to the development of a face recognition system for video.
Memory controller design: (Impulse Adaptive Memory Controller Project for DARPA/Airforce Research Labs) Micro architecture and VLSI design for an adaptive high performance memory controller for a 0.25u process. Development of functional and trace driven simulators.
Operating Systems: Ported Linux Ethernet drivers (Intel Ether Express
Pro, DEC Tulip) to the Flux OS kit. Created glue code to use the Linux
network drivers along with the pre-existing Free BSD TCP/IP stack
in the Flux OSkit. Implemented some security features required to
permit using user space message buffers in the Fluke micro-kernel's
messaging API.
Graduate Technical Intern, Apple Computer, Inc., Cupertino,
CA
Summer 2001-Fall 2001
Design and implementation of a floating point unit for multimedia
in a deep sub-micron process. I reverse engineered the Multiply-add
floating point unit in the Altivec SIMD portion of the IBM PowerPC.
Apple needed a clean room implementation of this circuit in a 0.13u
process. I wrote test code to analyze the properties of the PowerPC
unit such as treatment of rounding modes, precision and error accumulation,
treatment of exceptional cases and Java floating point. I designed
the micro-architecture and implemented a fully pipelined floating
point unit using Module Compiler from Synopsys. I also implemented
an extensive PLI to verify the unit.
Graduate Technical Intern, Intel Corp., Austin, TX
Summer 2000-Fall 2000
Design of a VLIW Instruction Set Architecture for multimedia applications.
Analysis of multimedia kernels for performance on high performance
processors with multimedia extensions. I reported directly to an Intel
Fellow/VP investigating a strategic research project in stream processing.
I single handedly designed the instruction set and architecture for
a VLIW stream processor directly competing with a vector processor
architect with three decades of industry experience and a stream processor
research group at Intel's Microprocessor research labs in collaboration
with Stanford. Based on characterization information (area, power,
delay) for Intel's IA-64 architecture, I developed a small VLIW streaming
architecture that consumed 10% of the area and power of the main
core but delivered 10 times the performance of the main core on streaming
tasks thus easily meeting the design goal provided to me. I also guided
the work of an Intel engineer who developed an architecture simulator
based on my design.
Software Engineer, Novell Inc. R&D Center, Bangalore, India
1995-1997
Design and implementation of TCP based packet burst protocol and broadcast
mechanism as Unix System V kernel modules to improve the performance
of network file I/O. Implementation of a multi-threaded Unix kernel
driver for file sharing across multiple address spaces to accelerate
burst reads and writes. Strategy to multi-thread the core engine of
the NetWare NOS on several Unix platforms. Researched and prototyped
a new product to do enterprise wide multi-platform user management.
Implemented a multi-platform prototype network information service
daemon. Guided the development of an IP firewall for Linux based on
a Forth kernel built into the OS.
Technical Intern, Center for Development of Imaging Technology,
India
Summer 1994
Design and simulation of analog filter circuits for the Indian space
program (ISRO) using the Mentor Graphics system.
MPP Interconnect Network: Designed a scalable MPP interconnect
architecture including network topology, network interface, routing
and congestion control protocols and deadlock avoidance/detection
mechanism. Designed a prototype circuit based on asynchronous macro-modules.
Wormhole Router: Used ViewLogic to design a Worm-hole router
for an MPP interconnect using Actel FPGAs.
Lisp to Asynchronous Circuit Compiler: Designed and implemented
a compiler that translates circuits described as concurrent processes
in a Lisp like language to a macro-modular asynchronous circuit.
Symbolic Layout Generation for Static CMOS Circuits: Designed
and implemented a tool to do technology mapping and symbolic layout
generation for multi level combinational circuits by CMOS cell generation.
Micro-kernel OS: Designed and implemented from scratch, a
micro-kernel OS for the Intel 80386 and later processors. (B.Tech
Thesis Project)
WormKit: A three member group implemented the WormKit, a
library that provides the infrastructure for building fault tolerant
wormed applications. I did the overall design and implemented the
threaded interpretive language and directory services that formed
the core of WormKit.
All papers are available online at http://www.cs.utah.edu/mbinu/pubs/.
My current research project named XStream focuses on the rapid design of complex ASICs and SoCs based on the use of highly efficient custom stream processors as primary building blocks. The technology is being developed by a three member team lead by me at the Siemens Technology to Business Center in Berkeley, CA. Core ideas are being patented at the moment. These will form the foundation for a new company spun off from Siemens named Satva Design Automation (http://www.satvad.com).
Increasing CMOS integration has lead to the emergence of system on chips (SoCs) that combine complex hardware and software subsystems. This ever-increasing complexity leads to escalating design costs that are compounded by faster time-to-market pressures. Having reached the limits of conventional hardware-oriented Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools, complex SoC designers and architects are transitioning to the Electronic Systems Level (ESL) methodology that leverages both hardware and software to implement complex SoCs. XStream is a perfect example of a tool that can greatly boost productivity using a mixed hardware/software approach to system design.
This research addresses issues such as: expressing design trade-offs in terms that make sense at the application level, performing benchmark-driven exploration, automatic derivation of extremely lightweight processors or ensembles of processors that are optimized for the particular problem at hand, automatic generation of a software tool chain and simulation infrastructure, generating accurate energy and area estimates, generating designs that are correct by construction, thereby greatly speeding up system verification and timing closure, automatically generating interfaces to connect newly generated modules to existing IP modules and exploring the trade-off between programmability and hardware efficiency
Stream processors are well suited for well structured repetitive applications in the media, signal processing, wireless communications and perceptual application domains that require high computational throughput and communication bandwidth simultaneously with good area and power efficiency. My current research in stream processing addresses three key areas. a) Energy-delay optimization and architecture exploration for embedded low power stream processors. b) Algorithms that integrate simultaneous task scheduling and on-chip memory allocation for stream processors. c) Time vs Space multiplexing: Traditionally, DSP architectures have favored a pipeline of processor style design where multiple processors are chained together with the output of algorithms running on one processor fed as input to algorithms running on the next processor. This is called space multiplexing. Scientific applications typically use a time-multiplexed approach where all processors work on one algorithm in parallel, then move on to the next algorithm and so on. My research analyzes the area, power and compute efficiencies of both styles for a diverse set of applications.
Computers of the near future need to efficiently process perception-oriented workloads like large vocabulary speech recognition and computer vision. Early estimates show that the computation requirements of such workloads will exceed 10GOPS. Even if the high end computers of tomorrow can solve these problems, by their very nature, perception tasks are more useful on low-end and mobile platforms ranging from PDAs, automobile computers and information kiosks, to gadgets embedded into automated homes and offices. The power and performance requirements of perception algorithms are orders of magnitude beyond the capabilities of typical embedded processors. My research focuses on the generation of domain-specific stream processors that can accelerate the performance of a variety of perception algorithms at low power budgets. Over a set of perception and streaming benchmarks, my prototype delivers 1.75 times the performance of a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 while using only 1/15th of the energy consumed by an Intel XScale embedded processor. This corresponds to a factor of 135 improvement in the energy delay product when compared to a state of the art embedded processor. Details are available online at http://www.cs.utah.edu/mbinu/research/.
Base-stride vectors are common in scientific code. I developed a new mathematical technique to decompose a base-stride vector into multiple vectors that can be accessed in parallel on a multi-bank memory system. This approach was implemented in the hardware for an SDRAM memory controller. This memory system achieved speedups ranging from 4 to 39 times for a variety of scientific kernels.
| Advanced Computer Architecture | CAD of Digital Circuits |
| Parallel Computer Architecture | Fundamentals of Integrated Circuit Design |
| Design and Evaluation of Advanced Computer Architectures | Hardware Emulation |
| Advanced Digital VLSI Systems Design | Operating Systems |
| Switching Theory (Classic CAD Algorithms) | Advanced Operating Systems |
| VLSI Architecture | Programming Languages |
| Seminars: | |
| High Performance I/O Architecture | High Performance Memory systems |
| Networking | OS and Compilers |
References: Provided on request