Biography

Hi! I am Stefan, a doctoral student in the Processor Architecture Laboratory, advised by Professor Paolo Ienne. Prior to my PhD, I have received a BSc (2017) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Novi Sad.

I am broadly interested in FPGA architecture and CAD. In particular, my research focuses on developing new methods for efficiently exploring the design space of FPGA interconnect architecture. Although many of problems in this area have been considered almost closed in the past two decades, surging resistance of lower metal layers driven by technology scaling rendered most of the long standing rules of thumb used in interconnect architecture design obsolete. My goal is to combine state-of-the-art modeling with search methods based on combinatorial optimization, leveraging the specificities of the place and route algorithms, and clever heuristics, to rethink FPGA interconnect architecture in this new context. Novel architectures sometimes require new CAD algorithms which has allowed me to be active on that front as well.

Between September 2021 and February 2022, I interned in the Architecture team of Xilinx (now AMD), working on similar problems with Chirag Ravishankar and Dinesh Gaitonde.