Mr. Sameer Halepete
B.Tech., Electrical Engineering, 1993

Mr. Sameer Halepete is currently the Vice President of VLSI Engineering, NVIDIA Corporation.

Mr. Halepete received his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1993, where his research focused on characterizing defects in compound semiconductors using Deep Level Transient Spectroscopy (DLTS). He conducted this research at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). He earned his MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1995, where his research involved optimizing silicon surface microroughness using Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) measurements.

Mr. Halepete joined Sun Microsystems’ Advanced Development Group in 1995, where he researched low-power and ultra-low threshold-voltage CMOS circuits, earning several patents for circuit innovations.

In 1996, he joined Transmeta Corporation, where he worked on VLIW processors enabling dynamic binary translation for multi-GHz, low-power computing, significantly extending laptop battery life. His innovations in low power circuit and system design led to multiple patents in the field. In 2002, he joined NVIDIA Corporation to develop the company’s first streaming multiprocessor-based GPU, ushering in the era of general purpose computing and AI on graphics processors. Over his 23 year tenure at NVIDIA, he has led the development of multiple generations of GPUs, CPUs, and SoCs, driving breakthroughs in computing that resulted in real time ray tracing in graphics and the rise of generative AI. Mr. Halepete has delivered keynote speeches at leading EDA conferences, including the Design Automation Conference (DAC), and has spearheaded successful collaborations with EDA companies to advance state-of-the art computing silicon.

Any other interesting fact about yourself that you would like to share: My dad was also an electrical engineer, so I was lucky to be able to start playing with transistors when I was less than ten years old. Therefore, during my lifetime, I have seen a 100,000,000,000-fold increase in the transistor count of circuits – from the one-transistor circuit on a copper-clad PCB I built during my childhood to the more than 100 billion transistor GPUs in the most advanced CMOS technology that we are building at NVIDIA today.

Hobbies: Classical guitar, wildlife and landscape photography (https://samhale.pixpa.com/work/india-wildlife)

Special Memories Associated with IIT Bombay

Falling in love with VLSI engineering in the fascinating classes taught by Prof. Vasi and Prof. Dinesh Sharma, playing bass guitar for ‘Man’s Too Strong’ by Dire Straits at my first PAF – ‘Anno Domini’ - which ended up winning that year, midnight hakka noodles run to Chinese Corner, late night coding sessions at Cyber Centre, DJing at the Hostel 6 discotheque Footloose during Mood Indigo, going back to campus for the 25th reunion and hanging out with classmates after decades, and establishing a Chair Professorship to encourage AI research on campus.