Brief Biography

Dr. Betz is an Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Cerebras Systems. He is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Fellow, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, a Fellow of the Enggineering Institute of Canada, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. His research interests cover VLSI design and computer architecture (particularly FPGA and spatial processor array architecture), Computer-Aided Design algorithms, and methods of accelerating deep learing inference using parallelism and hardware acceleration. He conducts academic research into these topics as a Professor at the University of Toronto and industrial research as a member of Cerebras Systems next-generation hardware architecture team. He is Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems journal and serves on the program committees of several conferences in the CAD and programamble silicon areas.

The VPR toolset and methodology developed by Dr. Betz have become the standard for FPGA architecture research and the comparison point for CAD optimization quality, and have been used by over 180 companies and 1100 universities. Dr. Betz co-founded Right Track CAD to commercialize his research in 1998 and over the next two years helped grow the company to 10 engineers and several million dollars in yearly revenue. In 2000, Right Track CAD was acquired by one of its customers, Altera Corporation (a fortune 500 semiconductor company). Dr. Betz held several leadership positions within Altera over the next 11 years, ultimately as Senior Director of Software Engineering leading a team of 90 engineers. He is the architect of many features within Altera's Quartus CAD system, including the placement and routing engine and the power optimization tools, and these tools are used daily by tens of thousands of design engineers worldwide. He is also one of the architects of the Stratix and Cyclone FPGA families, which have cumulative sales of over $15 billion US to date.

Dr. Betz holds 102 US patents, and has received 18 best or most significant paper awards from top conferences and journals in the field. Six of his publications are included in the "FPGA20" most influential FPGA Symposium papers, and two of his publications are included in the "FPL25" most significant papers from the International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications. He is the author of one book and four book chapters on programmable logic and CAD and has received best paper awards from the FPGA Symposium, the International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), the International Conference on Field-Configurable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM), and International Conference on Field Prorammable Technology (FPT), and ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS).

Dr. Betz completed his PhD(ECE) at the University of Toronto and received both the Governor General's Award for best PhD thesis and the Douglas R. Colton Award for Research Excellence. He received his M.S. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993, and his B.Sc. (with University Gold Medal) from the University of Manitoba in 1991.

My Curriculum Vitae

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