Satnam Singh

Satnam Singh’s research involves finding novel ways to program and use special Lego-like chips called FPGAs. In particular, he is interested in making the circuits on these chips change as they run to adapt to new situations. Satnam Singh completed his PhD at the University of Glasgow in 1991 where he devised a new way to program and analyze digital circuits described in a special functional programming language. He then went on to be an academic at the same university (first in the Electrical Engineering department and then in the Computing Science department) and lead several research projects that explored novel ways to exploit FPGA technology for applications like software radio, Adobe Photoshop and high resolution digital printing, and graphics. In 1998 he moved to San Jose California to join Xilinx’s research lab where we developed more tools and technology for designing and formally verifying circuits for FPGAs as well as the actual FPGA chips. In particular, he developed a language called Lava in conjunction with Chalmers University which allows circuits to be laid out nicely on chips to give high performance and better utilization of silicon resources. In 2004 he joined Microsoft in Redmond Washington where we worked on a variety of techniques for producing concurrent and parallel programs and in particular explored join patterns and software transactional memory. In 2006 he moved to Microsoft’s research laboratory in Cambridge where he works on reconfigurable computing and parallel functional programming.