We were lucky enough to catch up with a guru of Field Programmable Gate Array’s (FPGA) and Digital Signal Processing (DSP), Dr. Chris Dick. Chris is a fellow of Xilinx and is their Chief DSP Architect. Xilinx an American technology company, primarily a supplier of programmable logic devices. It is known for inventing the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and as the firstsemiconductor company with a fabless manufacturing model. Founded in Silicon Valley in 1984, the company is headquartered in San Jose, California, with additional offices in Longmont, Colorado; Dublin, Ireland; Singapore; Hyderabad, India; Beijing, China; Shanghai, China; Brisbane, Australia and Tokyo, Japan. Below you will find a short intro video and the full podcast interview separately. Enjoy.
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About Chris:
Currently Chris is the Chief DSP Architect at Xilinx and heads the Communications Signal Processing Group working in the area of advanced wireless systems for 3G LTE, MIMO-OFDM and high-speed wired FEC technologies.
His research interests are in the areas of software defined radio (SDR), forward error correction, turbo equalizers, modem design, VLSI architectures for signal processing, FPGA-based signal processing, wireless systems, multicarrier modulation, MIMO, hardware architectures for real-time signal processing, fast algorithms, multirate filters, narrowband systems, DSP design flows and programming models for reconfigurable hardware. His signal processing background includes expertize in the following areas: narrowband modem design, synchronization for wireless and wireline communication systems, carrier recovery, timing recovery, adaptive equalizers, channel coding, computer arithmetic, MIMO decoders, turbo codes and turbo equalizers.
In addition to his experience in the wireless domain Chris has performed signal processing work in the area of speech and imaging radar (inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR)) signal processing. Chris has extensive experience programming in Matlab, Simulink, C (including fixed-point modeling of complex DSP designs), VHDL, FPGA design and programming Texas Instruments digital signal processors.
Chris has been an advisor to the National Science Foundation in the area of Application-Specific Hardware/Software, and FPGA-based and Reconfigurable Systems and has advised the US Defense Sciences Research Agency – an advisory arm of DARPA. He holds the position of adjunct professor at both Rice University and Santa Clara University where he teaches courses on signal processing and hardware implementation of real-time signal processing systems. Chris has in excess of 100 publications in refereed conferences and journals and has been an invited speaker at many industry events. He holds 20 patents (issued and pending).
Specialties: Bridging the gap between complex theoretical concepts and their cost-effective implementation in real-time systems. Ability to accommodate a range of tasks from high-level modeling through to low-level hardware implementation.
Interview conducted by Eddie Custovic, Editor in Chief, IMPACT by IEEE Young Professionals