Dr. Paul Chow
Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto

Paul Chow received the B.A.Sc. degree with honours in Engineering Science, and the M.A.Sc. and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont., in 1977, 1979 and 1984, respectively. In 1984 he joined the Computer Systems Laboratory at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, as a Research Associate, where he was a major contributor to an early RISC microprocessor design called MIPS-X, one of the first microprocessors with an on-chip instruction cache.  He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto in January 1988, where he is now a Professor and holds the Dusan and Anne Miklas Chair in Engineering Design. His research interests include high performance computer architectures, architectures and compilers for embedded processors, VLSI systems design, and field-programmable gate array architectures, systems, and applications.

From 1998 to 2001, Prof. Chow was the Chairman of the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) for the Canadian Microelectronics Corporation (CMC).  Since 2001, he has been a member of the CMC Board of Directors and participates in the TAC and its steering committee.

In December 1999, he co-founded AcceLight Networks to build a high-capacity, carrier-grade, optical switching system.  The key element was a burst-switching fabric that permitted easy integration of wavelength, TDM, and packet services in the same system using a unified control-plane based on GMPLS.  At its peak, the company employed about 260 people based in Ottawa, ON and Pittsburgh, PA. Prof. Chow was the Director of ASIC Technology from May 2000 to October 2002 and managed a group of close to 30 designers that developed over 40 large high-performance FPGA designs.

Dr. Justin Tripp
Los Alamos National Labs, New Mexico

In " Trident: From High-Level Language to Hardware Circuitry," Justin Tripp, Maya Gokhale, and Kristopher Peterson describe an effort undertaken at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to build Trident, a high-level-language to hardware-description-language compiler that translates C language programs to FPGA hardware circuits. While several such compilers are commercially available, Trident's unique characteristics include its open source availability, open framework, ability to use custom floating-point libraries, and ability to retarget to new FPGA board architectures. The authors enumerate the compiler framework’s building blocks and provide some results obtained on the Cray XD1 platform.

William Crick
Vice President Engineering, Fidus

Bill Crick is an accomplished program manager with more than 25 years’ experience building and coaching high-performance technology teams. He is known for inspiring designers to execute complex projects on schedule. Prior to joining Fidus, Bill managed teams of up to 50 engineers in start-up corporate environments and at Nortel Networks.

Bill has managed end-to-end product life cycles in a variety of disciplines. He has developed diverse technologies including computer, network and data-centre architectures; silicon and system design methods, as well as state-of-the-art ASICS. He has also served as a strategic advisor, evaluating new technologies and assessing the impact of emerging technologies on current and future business directions. Bill has a B.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo , and holds two patents.

Denzil Doyle
C.M., B.Sc., D.Eng., F.E.I.C

Denzil Doyle is Chairman of Doyletech Corporation, an Ottawa-based company specializing in providing consulting services to entrepreneurs, investors, policy makers, and economic development authorities. Although trained as an engineer (B.Sc. Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, 1956) he has spent most of his career in the business world. From 1963 to 1981, he directed the affairs of Digital Equipment Corporation's Canadian operations, which grew from a one-person sales office to a multi-faceted corporation with annual sales in excess of $160 million and offices across Canada. He formed Doyletech Corporation in 1982, and during the next twenty-three years provided consulting services to all provincial governments, to several federal government departments including Industry Canada, several venture capital firms, and the federal Minister of State for Science and Technology. From 1995 to 2005, he served as Chairman of Capital Alliance Ventures Inc., an Ottawa-based venture capital firm specializing in technology investments. Over the years, he has served on many boards of directors of Canadian technology enterprises, both public and private.

He is the author of several business articles and a text book entitled Making Technology Happen TM, now in its fifth edition. In recognition of his pioneering efforts in the establishment of the Ottawa technology cluster, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Engineering by Carleton University at its 1981 spring convocation. In 2001, he was granted a fellowship in the Engineering Institute of Canada. In 2005, he was invested as a Member of the Order of Canada.

John McCluskey
B.Sc., M. Eng., Senior Field Appication Engineer

John McCluskey is a Senior Field Application Engineer at Xilinx. He received the B.S. in Engineering and Applied Science from Caltech in 1981, and received a Masters in Engineering from McGill University in 1995. He started his digital design career at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1979, and emigrated to Canada in 1988, where he joined Spar Aerospace in 1991, with stints at J-Squared Technology (1995) and Lucent Technologies (1998) as an FPGA field engineer, before joining Xilinx as a Field Application Engineer in 2001. He will present partial results of the latest Xilinx research on creating FPGA coprocessors that connect to the Intel Front Side bus, enabling the direct integration of FPGA fabric into a conventional computing system.

Dr. Russell Tessier
Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Russell Tessier heads the Reconfigurable Computing Group at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He received the BS degree in computer systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from MIT. Dr. Tessier was a founder of Virtual Machine Works, a logic emulation company, that is now owned by Mentor Graphics. He has also worked at BBN, Ikos Systems, and Altera. His research interests include reconfigurable architectures, reconfigurable computing applications, CAD algorithms for FPGAs, and embedded system design. He has numerous publications in these fields, notably on the use of FPGAs for a reconfigurable data acquisition system for weather radar applications.