Dr Kiran Gunnam
2021 ValleyML Distinguished Technical Achievement Award Recipient

Kiran Gunnam

Distinguished Engineer – ML & Computer Vision, Western Digital

For long-lasting contributions to architectures and algorithms of real-time signal processing, communication, and machine learning systems that enabled ubiquitous computing.

Dr. Gunnam invented the most advanced Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) code decoder technology at Texas A&M University (TAMU) that enabled remarkable storage densities and high-speed wireless communications. His patented work has been already incorporated in more than 3 billion data storage, WiFi and 5G chips as of 2020 and is set to continue to be incorporated in more than 500 million chips per year. TAMU LDPC is the most advanced Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) code technology, originally developed and patented by Texas A&M University (TAMU) and is now currently used in high-volume storage and communication industry products. Dr. Kiran Gunnam is the primary inventor of TAMU LDPC. Industry implementations and the IEEE standards group studies have shown that TAMU LDPC has up to 75% savings in area and power over other LDPC designs and two orders of improvements over algebraic-coded implementations.

Dr. Gunnam has 86 issued US patents on algorithms, architectures, and real-time low-cost implementations for computing, storage-class memory, storage, computer vision, and AI. He is the primary or sole inventor for 90% of these innovations. His significant contributions include precise localization and navigation technology for autonomous aerial refueling and space docking applications; low-complexity simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for autonomous driving and robotic systems; storage-class memory (SCM) based storage systems; in-situ processing; and efficient domain-specific accelerator architectures for machine learning and computer vision with the co-optimization of algorithms, software, and hardware with the novel ways of fully exploiting sparsity and redundancy.

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