Prestigious Women Researchers Lecture Series | Paula Novío Mallón: 'How to design a mobile GPU: a look behind the scenes'

This presentation is an overview of the engineering work needed to design and implement a mobile Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). I will start with a brief introduction about my personal journey, about my motivations for moving from university to industry and about my career in the IP (Intellectual Property) industry. We will also explore the GPU architecture of a "traditional" rasterization GPU versus a Ray Tracing GPU. We will cover how we develop the GPU from the initial set of requirements and concept to the final implementation: who are the teams involved from Research, Architecture, Hardware and Software, how they are structured, the challenges they face during the development and how they interact throughout the lifetime of the project. We will also cover the different project phases, and the customer delivery.

The presentation is tailored to university students with basic knowledge and interest in computer architecture, computer graphics and would like to learn about how the semiconductors IP industry works and what opportunities are available.

About the speaker

Paula Novio Mallon (Santiago, 1977). Paula studied Physics in the University of Santiago de Compostela, specializing in Electronics and graduated in 1999. She completed a masters degree in 2000 entitled "Arquitectura Paralela para la conversion de curvas NURBS a curvas Bezier" and a PhD in 2006 entitled "Software/hardware techniques for mesh compression in computer graphics". As part of her PhD, she had internships in the Computer Science Department of Stony Brook University (2002) and Visualisation and Interactive Systems Institute (VIS) at the University of Stuttgart (2003 and 2004) where she developed her knowledge in Computer Graphics and Visualization techniques. Paula's industry journey has been centered in developing mobile GPU IP in the UK since 2006. Her career covers activities as a Hardware Engineer, Team Lead, Project Lead and Department Lead.

After completing her university studies, Paula joined Imagination Technologies in 2006 as a Hardware Design Engineer. Imagination Technologies Limited is a British semiconductor and software design company, its primary business is the design of PowerVR mobile graphics processors (GPUs), neural network accelerators for AI processing, and networking routers. During the first ten years she worked in the Hardware department as an engineer, designing the Texture Processing Unit, developing and implementing compression techniques, geometry processing, tessellation, PPAB analysis (Performance, Power, Area and Bandwidth) and overall GPU verification and validation activities. From 2015 until 2020 Paula was the Team Lead for the Texture Processing Unit, a team of 12 engineers working on the specification, design and verification of the texture pipeline unit. In 2020 Imagination Technologies introduced Ray Tracing GPUs back into the market and Paula was the Hardware Technical Lead of the project. During 2021 and 2022 Paula combined her activities as Project Lead and GPU HW Department Lead of a team of 75 engineers spread across multiple sites in the UK (Kings Langley, Manchester, Cambridge and Bristol).

In 2023 Paula moved to ARM. Arm is a British semiconductor and software design company, its primary business is in the design of ARM processors (CPUs) and also designs Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). She currently is Senior Hardware Principal Engineer in ARM and her main task is Program Engineering Lead.