Anant Agrawal is currently CEO of Insilica Inc, a fables semiconductor
company with operations in Santa Clara, LA and Bangalore. Prior
to Insilica Anant spent 18 years at Sun Microsystems. Of those 17
years, he was involved in the development of SPARC processors where
he was the VP and GM of the microprocessor groups.
He joined Sun in 1984 and was member of a very small team that
started the microprocessor effort at Sun. For one year he was the
VP/GM of the networking and security business unit. His group was
responsible for introducing IP traffic management and security services
to the Sun platforms. Prior to Sun he worked at STC Computer Research
Corp and Memorex Corporation Anant got his Master’s from Cornell
University and Bachelor’s from MS University, Baroda Anant
is on the board of directors of several high tech startups as well
as strategic advisor to venture funds.
Washington, Nov 18, 2004
PTI
An Indian American scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) is working on a project aimed at making hand-held
computing "as easy as breathing." Anant Agarwal, a professor
and researcher at the MIT, is involved in 'Project Oxygen' along
with 149 other researchers, The Washington Post reported today.
At the centre of the research, which is in its fifth year, is
a reprogrammable chip called RAW, for "raw architecture workstation".
It is one of many key pieces in MIT's USD50 million project funded
partly by the Defence Advanced Research: Projects Agency of the
Pentagon, which develoved the Internet and achieved many other
major breakthroughs.
Agarwal, said the Post, wants to redesign chip software and hardware
for the mobile age, creating chips that will be chameleon-like,
fulfilling many purposes, so that people could get more done with
less gear. It will theoretically make computing more mobile.
Also, devices embedded in "intelligent" rooms and stationary
objects could accomplish more by simply retrieving new instruction
sets. "Call it a universal logic chip that can do anything,"
Agarwal told the Post.
The goal of the project is to create a new computing environment,
in which computer capability would be ubiquitous and manipulating
computers as easy for people as breathing, the paper said.
Project Oxygen resechers want people to throw away the mouse
and talk to their computers, some of which would be embedded in
walls and ceilings.
Anant Agarwal is a professor in the MIT EECS department, and
a member of CSAIL. He is a fearless leader of Raw, which is a
project in the Computer Architecture Group (CAG) within CSAIL.
He hacks on WebSim in his spare time. WebSim is a prototype of
a web-based electronic circuits laboratory. His other projects
include LOUD, Oxygen, Alewife, Virtual Wires, and Fugu.
