Rishiyur Nikhil

Rishiyur Nikhil studied at IIT Kanpur (Bachelor's) and U. Pennsylvania (PhD). He was a faculty member in MIT's Lab for Computer Science, researching functional programming languages, dataflow and multithreaded computer architectures, and fine-grain MIMD parallelism, continuing this work at Digital Equipment Corp.'s Cambridge Research Lab. In the early 2000s he co-founded Bluespec, Inc., and remains CTO, working on the BSV and BH High-Level Hardware Design Languages, their tools and applications. He has created several open-source RISC-V CPU and System designs, and chaired the RISC-V Foundation's technical group that developed the RISC-V ISA formal spec.