Ricardo E. Gonzalez, Ph.D.
Principal Partner & Founder

Dr. Gonzalez is currently a Principal Partner at Silicon Artisans, an innovative consulting firm that specializes in architecture and design of semiconductor circuits. Prior to founding Silicon Artisans Dr. Gonzalez was an architect at Stretch, Inc., where he led the development of the S6 Software Configurable Processor Architecture.

His key responsibilities included processor architecture, DMA architecture, on-chip interconnect, and memory hierarchy. While at Stretch he led the development of the Processor Array Technology (PA), which enables systems to scale from one to tens of processors. He also was responsible for the architecture of the Programmable Accelerator, an Xtensa processor with hardware support for entropy coding, motion estimation, cryptography, and audio.

Before joining Stretch Dr. Gonzalez was a member of technical staff at Tensilica, Inc. He was a founding member of the hardware team and principally responsible for the design of the first generation Xtensa micro-architecture--which has evolved since then into the Xtensa 7. In subsequent years he led the development of the next generation Xtensa micro-architecture, now known as Xtensa LX.

Dr. Gonzalez also worked at Intel's Microcomputer Research Labs (MRL), where he explored novel branch architectures for high-performance processors. His solution enabled more efficient instruction fetch hardware and increased performance.

Dr. Gonzalez received his BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in '90, '92 and '97, respectively. His dissertation explored energy dissipation and energy efficiency in microprocessors. Much of the insight he gained at Stanford was later incorporated into his work at Stretch and Tensilica.

Dr. Gonzalez combines a passion for creative solutions with a wealth of experience in industry and academia. He enjoys helping clients find efficient solutions to difficult problems.