Designing general-purpose silicon for cryptography
Michael Gao
Video
Abstract:
The current generation of cryptographic primitives (such as ZK and FHE) requires much more compute than prior generations, and has created a field of study around dedicated silicon accelerators for cryptography. However, these accelerators (ranging from PipeZK to BTS) are largely algorithm- and even parameter-specific, and general-purpose acceleration is believed to be costly in overhead.
In this talk, we will explore what happens when we apply microprocessor design and hardware-software codesign techniques from industry to the design of a general-purpose accelerator for cryptography, and most excitingly, how far we can take things in the next 5 years.
Bio:
Michael is the CEO of Fabric Cryptography, a company that builds massively parallel general-purpose chips for cryptography that enable orders of magnitude higher performance than CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs. Before Fabric, Michael was a cofounder at Luminous, a photonic AI supercomputer startup backed by Bill Gates, where he led the system and chip-level architecture, and won the USA Math Olympiad.