James Ang

Chief Scientist for Computing in the Physical & Computational Sciences Directorate, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). US.

“The Democratization of Co-design“

20 February 2025

Abstract

The U.S. CHIPS R&D programs are creating an infrastructure for microelectronics prototyping and advanced packaging. This CHIPS infrastructure provides an unprecedented opportunity to create a low cost, agile, prototype hardware design and generation capability. This talk will provide an overview of a new DOE project that integrates capabilities to democratize the hardware-software co-design process—DeCoDe. We build on our history of compiler framework optimization to map domain specialized applications to high level synthesis tools; and integrate capabilities from many collaborators to both leverage from, and create our contribution back to, an open hardware technology commons.

Some highlights from this overview include, target converged application co-design drivers, leverage the open chiplet ecosystem to demonstrate heterogeneous computing where customized prototype designs are concentrated in only a few chiplets, support hardware composition with corresponding system software, and use prototype heterogeneous processor hardware to quantify improvements in energy efficiency. Our focus on low cost and agile hardware R&D defines boundaries on what DeCoDe can and cannot do. We work with open source hardware design tools to minimize the cost of commercial EDA tools and to benefit from open data sets, we leverage the open chiplet ecosystem to integrate our custom hardware designs with a much larger number of existing computing chiplets, and finally, we stay focused on hardware design for prototypes to support lab-to-fab R&D and validate ideas that industry might later bring to product.

Bio

Jim is the Chief Scientist for Computing in the Physical and Computational Sciences Directorate (PCSD) at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where he serves as the lab lead for the U.S. DOE, Office of Science (DOE/SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Program. PNNL’s ASCR portfolio includes over 20 R&D projects in applied mathematics, computer science, advanced architectures, 5G networking, and computational modeling and simulation. Jim’s computing leadership role also intersects with upstream technology challenges associated with microelectronics and semiconductors.

Shortly after joining PNNL, Jim helped organize the October 2018 DOE/SC workshop on Basic Research Needs for Microelectronics. The goal was to identify DOE’s Microelectronics R&D priorities for the next decade and beyond. This experience led to an invitation to serve on the executive committee for the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Decadal Plan. Several SRC workshops were held on topics that included, energy-efficient computing, networking and communications, analog electronics, memory and storage, and hardware support for cybersecurity and privacy. The outcomes of these workshops were documented in the SRC Decadal Plan report that describes the seismic shifts that will drive industry R&D challenges. Jim was recently appointed by the U.S. Commerce Secretary to serve on the DOC/NIST Industrial Advisory Committee to provide input on R&D gaps to address by the CHIPS and Science Act.

MW25 Slides