Dr. Chris Nicol

Chris Nicol is Vice President at d-Matrix and Head of d-Matrix Australia. He joined d-Matrix in 2020 as the company’s first software engineer, leading early chip software development, and later established the company’s Australian and Canadian R&D teams. He has led work on PyTorch MLIR compiler technology, runtime software, and product development for AI inference acceleration.

Before joining d-Matrix, Dr. Nicol was CTO and SVP at Wave Computing, a Silicon Valley startup focused on dataflow computing, where he helped design a Coarse Grain Reconfigurable Array architecture and supported the company through its Series A and B funding rounds. Earlier roles included CTO for Embedded Systems at NICTA, Managing Director of Agere Systems Australia, and CTO of Lucent Technologies Australia. He also worked at Bell Labs Research in Holmdel, New Jersey, and helped establish Bell Labs and Agere Systems microelectronics R&D facilities in Australia.

Dr. Nicol holds a BSc (Hons), Ph.D., and Executive MBA from the University of New South Wales. He has authored more than 50 international publications and holds over 30 U.S. patents in IC architecture and design, wireless baseband architectures, memory architectures, low-power IC design, and software methods. He has served on the program committees of IEEE ISSCC and ISLPED, contributed to Australian national ICT and research initiatives, and received the inaugural NSW Scientist of the Year Award for Computing Sciences in 2008 and the Clunies Ross Technology Award in 2009.