Rachit Nigam

I am an incoming professor at MIT in the EECS department where I will lead the Flame Lab. My goal is to build systems that democratize the design and use of specialized hardware. I am excited to work with folks who are dissatisfied with the current state of tools and techniques for hardware design. I am interested in radically new approaches that combine ideas from programming languages, computer architecture, VLSI, and computer-aided design to address the design, verification, and usability challenges of specialized hardware. In doing so, I want to build real systems, evaluate them rigorously, and get other people to use them.

My PhD research has produced three systems:

• Calyx: A compiler infrastructure for compiling high-level languages to efficient circuits. Calyx has been adopted by the LLVM CIRCT project and is the basis for several academic and research tools.
• Filament: a new hardware description language that uses a novel type system to guarantee correctness of pipeline composition. Filament’s ideas have influenced the design of Google’s XLS system and Jane Street’s HardCaml language.
• Dahlia: A high-level language for predictable accelerator generation. Dahlia demonstrated how type systems can connect high-level abstractions with circuit-level constraints.