Smartphones, smart speakers, and other connected devices these days rely on tiny but powerful chips that can process information quickly and efficiently. These system-on-chip (SoC) designs are responsible for everything from voice recognition to image processing. As demand grows for faster and more intelligent devices, engineers like Karthik Wali are at the heart of making that possible.
With a career spanning leading tech companies like Amazon, Synopsys, and LG Electronics, Wali has worked on some of the most complex SoC projects in production. His focus has been on developing high-speed data paths for neural network accelerators—specialized parts of a chip that power AI tasks. These innovations are now found in commercial devices and play a key role in speeding up performance while keeping power usage in check.
Discussing his work, he mentioned that he led the design of a neural co-processor at Amazon. This chip, built for machine learning, combines floating-point and integer operations with its own memory management and on-chip storage. It’s now shipping in real-world products. At LG, he developed a scalable computing core using RISC-V technology, helping bring advanced AI capabilities directly into consumer devices.
The professional has worked on more than just hardware design. At Synopsys, he introduced safety features for automotive chips and helped integrate secure-boot systems into IoT platforms. He also automated several backend design processes, saving teams time and ensuring project deadlines were met. His work helped improve the reliability and efficiency of engineering workflows across these organizations.
Power efficiency has been a major theme throughout his career. He has developed techniques to shut down parts of a chip when not in use and manage power dynamically, which helps extend battery life in mobile devices. These solutions are essential as devices become more capable but still need to run on limited energy. He is also known for solving some of the toughest challenges in chip development, such as making deep pipelines work reliably at advanced manufacturing nodes and simplifying complex tool flows. By introducing better timing strategies and improving verification processes, he helped reduce costly errors after chips were built.
Beyond his engineering work, Wali has offered clear perspectives on where the field is heading. He believes the next big gains in chip performance will come from reducing how far data needs to travel on the chip, rather than just increasing raw compute power. Using newer packaging methods and smarter memory placement could lead to major energy savings. He also sees a future where hardware and software are designed together more closely, with tools that automatically handle data placement to make chips easier to develop. And as AI becomes more common, he stresses the importance of building security features directly into accelerators to guard against potential risks.
So, while the consumer may never see the circuits and data paths engineers like Wali have built, they benefit from faster, longer-lasting, and smarter devices every day. In an industry where small technical decisions have a big impact, such approach to engineering is helping set new standards for what modern SoCs can do.
Lastly, the future of SoCs lies in designing chips that can think fast while wasting less energy. With AI pushing devices to do more in real time, engineers are finding new ways to shorten data paths, improve memory placement, and build security right into the hardware. It’s a space where every small improvement—whether in speed, efficiency, or reliability—can have a massive impact on how technology is experienced.