Gary Grewal

Education and Employment Background

Dr. Gary Grewal obtained his PhD from the University of Guelph in 1998. He first joined the Department of Computing and Information Science at the University of Guelph in 1999 as an Assistant professor, and is now an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science.

Research Themes

Grewal’s research mainly relates to developing Computer-Aided Design tools for Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Since their inception circa 1984, advances in transistor and integration technologies have enabled FPGAs to evolve from simple programmable logic fabrics suitable as glue logic, to heterogeneous devices that can implement whole systems on a chip. These systems are being employed in a wide range of contemporary applications important to society including communication, automotive, medical, wireless and data centers. Continual reductions in silicon die feature sizes, however, have brought new challenges for FPGA CAD tools. Increases in logic capacity, heterogeneous resources, and multiple dies have caused traditional objectives to become harder to optimize, and legality constraints harder to satisfy. These challenges necessitate new CAD techniques, especially for placement and routing, as these are the two most time-consuming steps in the FPGA CAD flow.

Grewal’s work seeks to improve FPGA CAD tools from the perspectives of speed and quality-of-result through the combined use of classical optimization techniques and modern machine learning and deep learning methods.

Highlights

• Michal Servit Award for most outstanding paper in area of design algorithms, methods, and CAD tools for FPGAs and self-aware systems, 2018
• Michal Servit Award for most outstanding paper in area of design algorithms, methods, and CAD tools for FPGAs and self-aware systems, 2017
• University of Guelph Faculty Association Distinguished Professor Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2017
• NSERC Discovery Grants every year from 1999-2023
• Former advisor to the Board of the Canadian Hemochromatosis Society

Media Coverage

Hemochromatosis

• Canadian Hemochromatosis Society: App Helps Patients Manage Genetic Disorder
• University of Guelph News: Computer Scientists Design App to Monitor Genetic Disorder
• Canadian Hemochromatosis Society: New app will help manage hemochromatosis
• Guelph Mercury: Guelph prof develops ‘iron-tracker’ app for Hemochromatosis
• Celtic Connection: New Iron Tracker app will help people with Hemochromatosis
• King Weekly Sentinel: King resident spearheads hemochromatosis awareness, holds golf tourney