Nachiket Kapre
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering · University of Waterloo
I lead the Waterloo Configurable Architectures Group (WatCAG). We build efficient machine-learning accelerators and agentic hardware-design workflows, supported by reconfigurable architectures, FPGA CAD, verification, and communication-centric systems.
I am a Professor at University of Waterloo and a Visiting Fellow at Tenstorrent. Previously, I was Research Director at Xilinx Labs (now part of AMD Research) Singapore, CTO of Plunify (now part of Lattice Semiconductor), and an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University.
Xilinx Labs
Plunify
Current Focus
ML accelerators & arithmetic
Efficient tensor blocks, emerging numerical formats, and accelerator organizations that balance compute, memory, and programmability.
Agentic hardware-design flows
Engineer-guided agents for specification, RTL generation, verification, synthesis, design-space exploration, and measured hardware feedback.
Reconfigurable architectures & CAD
Learning-guided FPGA tools, networks-on-chip, prototyping, and practical flows from application intent to deployed hardware.
Latest News
2026
FPL 2026 Stamatis Vassiliadis Memorial Best Paper Award for “Cocotb-PYNQ-PR: From Co-Simulation to Deployment, A Unified DFX Framework for PYNQ”. Certificate
2024
FPT 2024 Best Paper Award for “GraphNoC: Graph Neural Networks for Application-Specific FPGA NoC Performance Prediction”. Certificate
One full paper was accepted to FPT 2024.
2023
TRETS Best Paper Award 2023 for the RapidLayout paper. Certificate
I finished my duties as Program Chair of FCCM 2023.
I returned to Canada.
selected publications
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- Cocotb-PYNQ-PR: From Co-Simulation to Deployment, A Unified DFX Framework for PYNQIn International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications, Sep 2026