Neil Pittman

About

I am a Hardware Senior Hardware Engineer in the Embedded & Reconfigurable Systems Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA.  I participate in and support research projects in the areas of embedded and reconfigurable systems with emphasis on system architectures, software and tools.  My responsibilities include the development, testing and verification of prototype systems for experimentation under the guidance of my manager, Dr. Alessandro Forin.  I submit my results for publication to conferences and journals for review by the research community.

My most recent efforts have been in the area of tools and development support for hardware and software systems.  He has developed a robust Verilog HDL preprocessor, parser and AST for analyzing the code a variety of purposes from productivity support to debugging.  This has been integrated into a Visual Studio extension in development to support Verilog HDL development along software.

Previously, I had worked on a wide range of applications and systems starting with the eMIPS dynamically extensible microprocessor.  I worked several years contributing to the hardware features and software support of that platform culminating finally in checking in branch of NetBSD that took advantage of the eMIPS capability to load custom hardware data paths for accelerating software performance.  Following that I implemented a hardware version of the Smith-Watermen algorithm as part of an experiment in secure accelerated genome matching.  I also adapted a hardware implementation of the Forest Fire Decision Tree Algorithm for Background Removal Image Segmentation. 

I joined Microsoft Research in February of 2007 after completing all requirements for my Masters of Science degree in Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University.  My thesis presented the basic architecture that would allow partial reconfiguration of FPGAs to be used for the implementation of extensible instruction set microprocessors.  This is the architecture on which the eMIPS prototype is based.  I received my Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Texas A&M University in College Station, TX as well, graduating Cum Laude.

Prior to joining Microsoft Research, I was a member of the Real Time Distributed Systems Lab at Texas A&M University, as a Graduate Research Assistant.  I worked under my advisor, Dr. Steve Liu, researching how the partial reconfiguration feature of some FPGAs could be leveraged in embedded systems.  I completed my academic requirements in December 2006 and defended my thesis, “Extensible Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages (eMIPS), The Reconfigurable Microprocessor”, in January 2007.

I live in Woodinville, WA, on the eastside of the Seattle area, with my wife, Jennifer, and my children, Caralyn and Alexander.  I moved to the Seattle area with my family after accepting my current position at Microsoft Research.