Prof. Luca Carloni of Columbia: Agile and Collaborative System-on-Chip Design with Open-Source Hardware Platforms

Open-source hardware can play a unique role for the semiconductor industry in the age of sustainable AI. It can enable design reuse, foster collaboration, and support workforce development. ESP (Embedded Scalable Platforms) is an open-source research platform for system-on-chip (SoC) design that combines a modular architecture with an agile design methodology. The ESP architecture simplifies the design and prototyping of heterogeneous chips with multiple RISC-V processor cores and dozens of loosely coupled accelerators, all interconnected by a scalable network-on-chip. The ESP methodology promotes system-level design while accommodating different specification languages and design flows.

ESP’s capabilities have enabled a small team, primarily composed of graduate students, to realize two SoCs of increasing complexity, each within a few months. Conceived as a heterogeneous system integration platform and refined through years of teaching at Columbia University, ESP is well suited to advance collaborative engineering across the open-source hardware community.

This talk will be followed by a standing lunch next to BC420 from 12:15 to 13:30.

Bio:

Luca Carloni is professor and chair of Computer Science at Columbia University in the City of New York. He holds a Laurea Degree Summa cum Laude in Electronics Engineering from the University of Bologna, Italy, and an MS in Engineering and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, both from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include heterogeneous computing, system-on-chip platforms, embedded systems, and open-source hardware. He co-authored over two hundred refereed papers.

Luca received the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the ONR Young Investigator Award. In 2025, he received the IEEE/ACM A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation for the paper “Latency-Insensitive Protocols” and the Columbia Engineering School (SEAS) Alumni Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award. He is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow.