Karu's research has pioneered the principles of dataflow computing, focusing on the role of architecture, microarchitecture and the compiler. His research breakthroughs include constraint-theory based compilation for spatial architectures, specialized datapaths that can be dynamically configured, hybrid dataflow von-Neumann execution, new dataflow execution models that combine streaming and dataflow. His work has been featured in industry forums of Mentor and Synopsys, and has been covered by the New York Times, Wired, IEEE Spectrum, and Microprocessor Report.