Name:Michael Christensen

Bio:

I recently defended my PhD thesis, entitled “Programming Language Techniques for Improving ISA and HDL Design”, at UC Santa Barbara, where I worked with both the Programming Languages λab and Computer Architecture Lab. My research focused on applying principles of programming language theory to make it easier to reason about instruction set architectures and to improve how we write hardware designs in both the CMOS and superconducting electronics realms.

In particular, I worked on:

• Zarf, a novel ISA based on the lambda calculus
• Wire Sorts, an approach to improving the composability of modules in digital hardware designs
• HDLs and simulation frameworks for superconducting electronics.

I’m now working full-time as a Research Scientist on the HHVM team at Meta.

I’m also an active maintainer of PyRTL, an awesome language for Pythonic register-transfer level design. Give it a try for any of your hardware design-related needs!

Country:United States

Affiliation:University of California at Santa Barbara

Research interests:Programming Languages, Computer Architecture