Sanjay J. Patel is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Willett Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he pursues research and design of ultra high-performance architectures and systems for emerging applications.

Since 2004, Sanjay has been the Chief Architect at AGEIA Technologies, overseeing the architecture and design of AGEIA's high- performance ASICs for accelerating physical simulation in video games. This talk will cover some of the technical, operational, and economic issues encountered during the "starting up" of AGEIA. We'll take a deeper dive into AGEIA's simulation technology and chip architecture, mostly to motivate Rigel, a new substrate for irregularly parallel applications.

He is the co-author (with Yale Patt of The University of Texas at Austin) of an introductory textbook for computer science and engineering students, titled "Introduction to Computing Systems: From Bits and Gates to C and Beyond", which is now available in its second edition from McGraw-Hill.

Sanjay has been an ECE faculty member since joining the department in 1999. He received his PhD from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1999.