Senior Hardware Design Engineer in MIPS I6400 microprocessor development team

My career started during the Soviet times. When I was a student at Phystech I participated in the development of a C-compiler for a computer called Elektronika SS BIS, which was an equivalent of the famous supercomputer Cray-1. I then moved to the Silicon Valley, started working in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry and eventually became a founder of a startup company called C Level Design. Our company got an investment from Intel Capital and our customers included Hitachi and Fujitsu. For the last 7 years I have been working as an engineer in the MIPS processor design team. Our team originated with the MIPS project at Stanford back in 1980, then it became MIPS Computer Systems, then a division of Silicon Graphics, eventually got spun-off as an independent company called MIPS Technologies and finally became a business unit of Imagination Technologies, a British company best known as a developer of the PowerVR GPU inside Apple’s iPhone.

Using MIPS microprocessors for Internet of Things, computer vision and Telecommunications

Opportunities for Russian software developers in MIPS ecosystem

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Nowdays MIPS microprocessor cores are used in Microchip PIC32 microcontrollers, Wi-Fi router chips from Qualcomm / Atheros and MediaTek / Ralink, Samsung Artik 1 platform positioned for Internet of Things, and Mobileye chips for automotive electronics. MIPS core licensees include Russian companies Baikal Electronics, the designer of Baikal-T embedded microprocessor, as well as ELVEES-NeoTek, the developer of ELISE chip for smart cameras.

In my presentation I will speak about various opportunities for Russian software developers connected to the ecosystem of these chips. The opportunities include development of hypervisors for virtualization, which is important for the market of Internet of Things, with its high requirements for security; the development of embedded operating systems that use hardware-supported multi-threading; and the development of heterogeneous multi-core systems that combine CPUs and GPUs for applications in artificial intelligence and computer vision. MIPS I6400 is positioned for the latter market, and I have been lucky to be a member of this processor’s design team at this time.