ARM recruits Russian computer scientist for architecture extensions

ARM recruits Russian computer scientist for architecture extensions
By Peter Clarke, Semiconductor Business News
April 7, 2003 (3:43 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030407S0064

CAMBRIDGE, England -- Vladimir Vasekin, a computer scientist who co-founded a research group that contributed to a Russian fifth generation computer project, has been working for the last eight months to help ARM Holdings plc improve its processor offerings.

ARM, a developer of the architecture and circuitry for processor cores that it makes available for license, includes almost all the major semiconductor manufacturers, including Intel, amongst its licensees.

Vasekin, who has been working in R&D at ARM for about eight months, is modest about his journey from Novosibirsk, Siberia, in what was the USSR, to Cambridge, England, where ARM is headquartered.

"I would not say it is something very outstanding, maybe a bit unusual," Vasekin said.

But that journey is now set to take Vasekin even further west. He is due to present a major ARM paper at the forthcoming Embedded Processor Forum in San Jose, California, June 16 through June 19.

D uring his time at Novosibirsk State University Vasekin was one of four students who formed the Kronos Research Group (KRG) in 1984. Two of his colleagues, Dmitry Kuznetsov and Alex Nedoria, came from the Math department and Eugen Tarasov was a colleague of Vasekin's in the Physics department.

"At that time the main objective was to build home computers for ourselves," said a home page for the Kronos Research Group that was hosted here when this story was first posted. In 1985 the group joined the START project, a Russian fifth generation computer project also known as MARS, and played a leading role in the development of the first Russian 32-bit workstation and its software, according to the page.

Kronos

The CPU was called Kronos and the expanded Kronos Research Group designed and implemented a multi-user, multi-tasking operating system called Excelsior, along with Modula-2, C, and Fortran compilers to run on it, and wr ote various pieces of application software.

With expertise in compilation technology and unusual ways of getting the maximum computation out of minimum hardware resources it is, perhaps, no surprise that of that expanded Kronos group several researchers have gone on to work for Microsoft Corp. in Seattle, Washington. Others on the list have stayed in academia and yet others have formed start-up companies in and around Novosibirsk, prompted by the collapse of the USSR.

However Vasekin, who was mainly been responsible for hardware implementation in Kronos he said, transferred to the University of Surrey, Guildford, England, where he performed research on distributed systems before moving on to Telecom Modus Ltd. in nearby Leatherhead.

Telecom Modus was formed as a joint venture between NEC and ERA Technology Ltd. in 1999 oriented towards third generation communications. Vasekin's distributed systems expertise was of interest at Telecom Modus, which works for NEC on basestation and 3G network theor y and implementations.

Vasekin's move into telecommunications familiarized him with existing versions of the ARM architecture and implementations that are used in the vast majority of mobile phone handsets.

That may supply a hint, but does not fully explain, why Vasekin transferred to ARM about eight months ago. That answer may come on June 17 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose where Vasekin is scheduled to present on "New extensions to the ARM v6 architecture" as listed here when this story was first posted.

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