Biography
Email address: wassal at eng.cu.edu.eg
Amr Wassal received his B.Sc. (Hons.) and M.Sc. degrees in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Cairo University in 1993 and 1996 respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, in 2000. He was affiliated with the VLSI Research Group and the Center for Applied Research in Cryptography (CACR) at the University of Waterloo, Canada for three years.
He has over 26 years of R&D experience in the semiconductor industry. He has held several senior technical and managerial positions at Si-Ware Systems, PMC-Sierra, ICCC A/S Denmark, IBM Technology Group among others. He is currently consulting to several local and international companies in the areas of EDA tools, digital design and architecture, as well as, semiconductor device production. He has acted as a PI and led the development of many chip tape-outs either as chip architect and/or digital ASIC technical manager targeting highly innovative applications including inertial stabilization platforms, MEMS-based low-ppm clock generator, MEMS-based actuation and sensing platforms, Wireless LAN frequency synthesizer, RAID-on-Chip, 36 port SAS/SATA switches, 6Gbps SerDes, 18 port Fiber Channel switch, ATM DSLAM chipset, Queue management unit, and a Galois field coprocessor for cryptographic applications. Most of these devices are either currently in production or sampling.
In addition to these innovative devices, Dr. Wassal has a number of conference and journal papers and patents and patent applications in the areas of modeling and architecture of switching fabrics and cryptographic processors. While at PMC-Sierra, he has also served as a liaison to the ANSI INCITS T10 Technical Committee – Phy Working Group and made several technical contributions to the SAS-2 standard.
He is currently a Professor at the Computer Engineering Department, Cairo University. His current research interests are in the areas of reconfigurable and multi-core DSP processors for wireless and MEMS applications as well as classical Chemometrics and modern machine learning techniques for IR spectroscopy modeling. He also has active interest in different areas of EDA algorithms and technologies, as well as, control architectures for electro-mechanical systems.