San Diego, California, United States
Like all engineers, I like solving problems and designing solutions. And as my career, experience, and knowledge have grown, I've had the opportunity to tackle larger, more complex, "system-level" problems. One of the best parts is it has always involved learning about and developing new technologies, use-cases, and applications. I have designed and architected state-of-the-art mobile SoCs at Qualcomm for the vast majority of my career, and the challenge of integrating ever increasing levels of functionality & computing power in a given power and cost profile has provided a never-ending set of challenges. My goal has always been to develop robust, scalable, and holistic solutions - elegant solutions which fit together seamlessly and are architecturally consistent. One of the best parts of the job has been exposure to a very wide range of technologies - always cool to learn new stuff. I'm not a big fan of inspirational quotes but Steve Jobs' "Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple." resonates. Complexity grows organically and unintentionally when solutions are hacked together... making them un-managable and un-scalable. Currently I have been spending a lot of time on security issues involving Trust in the context of mobile SoCs. How do we establish and maintain a secure root-of-trust in our increasing complex hardware and software? How do we protect IP and what is worth protecting? Who is trusted? Who are the attackers? The same entity is often an ally in one scenario and an attacker in another. What is the right balance of cost v. security? It's good stuff. Trying to find more time to learn more about deep learning - enjoying all of Dr. Ng's online courses. Every engineer should be watching.
Leading an exceptional world-wide engineering team within NXP's MCU & MPU SoC Engineering group creating state-of-the-art Automotive and Edge Processing SoCs. The team encompasses product-line and technology chief engineers and chip leads as well as the SoC architecture, security, and functional safety teams.
My responsibilities include setting the architectural roadmap, priorities, and review of architecture proposals for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoCs to meet future product specs & use-cases. I'm focused primarily on the premium-tier Snapdragon SoC Chassis specification while also contributing to lower-tier solutions for cost-sensitive markets. In addition to mobile SoC, I'm also involved with a new SoC architecture for a machine-learning inference accelerator SoC for data centers. My current technical areas of focus: resource & power management, trust/security, ARMv9 ecosystem, boot/reset/clocking, debug, physical RTL partitioning In conjunction with the architect work, I also manage the design team which owns all of the lower management, debug, sensor management, clock and cryptographic/security IP used in all of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoCs. We are a world-wide design team of ~130 engineers with offices in the USA, India, and Europe. Our new European office in Cork, Ireland is only around two years old and is growing rapidly.
SoC Hardware and Architecture
Chip lead for MSM8x60