Ben Keller | Research

Ben Keller

Ben joined the Accelerators & VLSI research group at NVIDIA in 2017 after an internship with the group three years earlier. His research interests include energy-efficient deep learning inference accelerator design, clocking and synchronization, and improved methodologies for ASIC design effort reduction.

Ben received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2015 and 2017, respectively. He completed his B.S. in Engineering at Harvey Mudd College in 2010.

Research Area(s)

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Circuits and VLSI Design

Computer Architecture

Main Field of Interest

Circuits and VLSI Design

Google Scholar

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=D-hDMb4AAAAJ

Publications

2026

PARE: A Power and Area-Efficient Memory Controller for High-Bandwidth DRAM

Andre Green, Niladrish Chatterjee, Mike O'Connor, Ben Keller, David Nellans, Borivoje Nikolic

International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)

GalaxyDiT: Efficient Video Generation with Guidance Alignment and Adaptive Proxy in Diffusion Transformers

Zoey Song, Steve Dai, Ben Keller, Brucek Khailany

Alpha-Vision: A Real-Time Always-on Vision Processor with 787µs Face Detection Latency in <5mW

Ben Keller, Rangharajan Venkatesan, Steve Dai, Jason Clemons, Matt Fojtik, Muya Chang, Thierry Tambe, Nathaniel Pinckney, Stephen Tell, Qijing Jenny Huang, Shalini De Mello, Brucek Khailany

2025

GauRast: Enhancing GPU Triangle Rasterizers to Accelerate 3D Gaussian Splatting

Sixu Li, Ben Keller, Yingyan Celine Lin, Brucek Khailany

Design Automation Conference (DAC)

2023

AutoDMP: Automated DREAMPlace-based Macro Placement

Anthony Agnesina, Puranjay Rajvanshi, Tian Yang, Geraldo Pradipta, Austin Jiao, Ben Keller, Brucek Khailany, Mark Haoxing Ren

International Symposium on Physical Design 2023

A 95.6-TOPS/W Deep Learning Inference Accelerator With Per-Vector Scaled 4-bit Quantization in 5 nm

Ben Keller, Rangharajan Venkatesan, Steve Dai, Stephen Tell, Brian Zimmer, Charbel Sakr, William Dally, Tom Gray, Brucek Khailany

Journal of Solid-State Circuits

2022

HEAT: Hardware-Efficient Automatic Tensor Decomposition for Transformer Compression

Jiaqi Gu, Ben Keller, Jean Kossaifi, Anima Anandkumar, Brucek Khailany, David Z. Pan

Workshop on ML for Systems at NeurIPS

Spotlight Paper

XT-PRAGGMA: Crosstalk Pessimism Reduction Accessible by GPU Gate-level Simulations and Machine Learning

Vidya Chhabria, Ben Keller, Yanqing Zhang, Sandeep Vollala, Sreedhar Patty, Mark Haoxing Ren, Brucek Khailany

MLCAD '22: Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE Workshop on Machine Learning for CAD

A 17–95.6 TOPS/W Deep Learning Inference Accelerator with Per-Vector Scaled 4-bit Quantization for Transformers in 5nm

Ben Keller, Rangharajan Venkatesan, Steve Dai, Stephen Tell, Brian Zimmer, William Dally, Tom Gray, Brucek Khailany

2022 Symposium on VLSI Technology & Circuits Digest of Technical Papers

2021

IPA: Floorplan-Aware SystemC Interconnect Performance Modeling and Generation for HLS-based SoCs

Nathaniel Pinckney, Rangharajan Venkatesan, Ben Keller, Brucek Khailany

IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD ’21)

Simba: scaling deep-learning inference with chiplet-based architecture

Yakun Sophia Shao, Jason Clemons, Rangharajan Venkatesan, Brian Zimmer, Matt Fojtik, Ted Jiang, Ben Keller, Alicia Klinefelter, Nathaniel Pinckney, Priyanka Raina, Stephen Tell, Yanqing Zhang, William Dally, Joel Emer, Tom Gray, Brucek Khailany, Steve Keckler

Communications of the ACM

ACM Research Highlight

Verifying High-Level Latency-Insensitive Designs with Formal Model Checking

Steve Dai, Alicia Klinefelter, Mark Haoxing Ren, Rangharajan Venkatesan, Ben Keller, Nathaniel Pinckney, Brucek Khailany

MAVIREC: ML-Aided Vectored IR-Drop Estimation and Classification

Vidya A. Chhabria, Yanqing Zhang, Mark Haoxing Ren, Ben Keller, Brucek Khailany, Sachin S. Sapatnekar

2021 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)

2020

Accelerating Chip Design with Machine Learning

Brucek Khailany, Mark Haoxing Ren, Steve Dai, Saad Godil, Ben Keller, Robert Kirby, Alicia Klinefelter, Rangharajan Venkatesan, Yanqing Zhang, Bryan Catanzaro, William Dally

A 0.32–128 TOPS, Scalable Multi-Chip-Module-Based Deep Neural Network Inference Accelerator With Ground-Referenced Signaling in 16 nm

Brian Zimmer, Rangharajan Venkatesan, Yakun Sophia Shao, Jason Clemons, Matt Fojtik, Ted Jiang, Ben Keller, Alicia Klinefelter, Nathaniel Pinckney, Priyanka Raina, Stephen Tell, Yanqing Zhang, William Dally, Joel Emer, Tom Gray, Steve Keckler, Brucek Khailany

IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC)

JSSC 2020 Best Paper award

2019

MAGNet: A Modular Accelerator Generator for Neural Networks

Rangharajan Venkatesan, Sophia Shao, Miaorong Wang, Jason Clemons, Steve Dai, Matt Fojtik, Ben Keller, Alicia Klinefelter, Nathaniel Pinckney, Priyanka Raina, Yanqing Zhang, Brian Zimmer, William Dally, Joel Emer, Steve Keckler, Brucek Khailany

International Conference On Computer Aided Design (ICCAD)

Simba: Scaling Deep-Learning Inference with Multi-Chip-Module-Based Architecture

Sophia Shao, Jason Clemons, Rangharajan Venkatesan, Brian Zimmer, Matt Fojtik, Ted Jiang, Ben Keller, Alicia Klinefelter, Nathaniel Pinckney, Priyanka Raina, Stephen Tell, Yanqing Zhang, William Dally, Joel Emer, Tom Gray, Brucek Khailany, Steve Keckler

International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)

Best Paper award, IEEE Micro Top Picks in Computer Architecture (Honorable Mention)

A 0.11 pJ/Op, 0.32-128 TOPS, Scalable Multi-Chip-Module-based Deep Neural Network Accelerator Designed with a High-Productivity VLSI Methodology

Rangharajan Venkatesan, Sophia Shao, Brian Zimmer, Jason Clemons, Matt Fojtik, Ted Jiang, Ben Keller, Alicia Klinefelter, Nathaniel Pinckney, Priyanka Raina, Stephen Tell, Yanqing Zhang, William Dally, Joel Emer, Tom Gray, Steve Keckler, Brucek Khailany

Hot Chips: A Symposium on High Performance Chips

A 0.11 pJ/Op, 0.32-128 TOPS, Scalable Multi-Chip-Module-based Deep Neural Network Accelerator with Ground-Reference Signaling in 16nm

Brian Zimmer, Rangharajan Venkatesan, Sophia Shao, Jason Clemons, Matt Fojtik, Ted Jiang, Ben Keller, Alicia Klinefelter, Nathaniel Pinckney, Priyanka Raina, Stephen Tell, Yanqing Zhang, William Dally, Joel Emer, Tom Gray, Steve Keckler, Brucek Khailany

Symposium on VLSI Circuits

PRIMAL: Power Inference using Machine Learning

Yuan Zhou, Mark Haoxing Ren, Yanqing Zhang, Ben Keller, Brucek Khailany, Zhiru Zhang

Design Automation Conference (DAC)

A Fine-Grained GALS SoC with Pausible Adaptive Clocking in 16 nm FinFET

Matt Fojtik, Ben Keller, Alicia Klinefelter, Nathaniel Pinckney, Stephen Tell, Brian Zimmer, Tezaswi Raja, Kevin Zhou, William Dally, Brucek Khailany

ASYNC 2019 Best Paper Award