A new chip, made programmable

Micron built a genuinely new kind of processor. But a chip developers can’t think in is a chip nobody adopts.

Sketch of two Micron Automata Processor chips

Sketch of the visual development environment: toolbar, timeline, and an automata network graph

The stuck thing

The Automata Processor didn’t work like other silicon: instead of executing instructions, it matched patterns across data streams, massively in parallel, the class of workload that machine learning would soon make ubiquitous. It had the notable ability to generate and execute nondeterministic finite automata (NFA) at the hardware level. The engineers who might use it had no way to build for it: automata designs lived in low-level definitions, and the mental model the chip demanded didn’t exist in any tool.

The diagnosis

The chip wasn’t the problem. The seam was between a novel architecture and the way developers already think. Automata are naturally spatial: states and connections, a graph you can see. Asking engineers to author them in text hid the one representation that made the chip make sense. What was missing was a tool where the chip’s native structures were visible and directly workable.

Made it go

I created the initial concepts and the proposal that landed the project, developed the visual and interaction design for the development environment, and worked directly with the software developers implementing it. The work outgrew its delivery date in the right direction. Micron wanted a public face for the technology, so I created the proposal and initial design for its developer portal, micronautomata.com: an introduction for general audiences, application information for target markets, and documentation, tutorials, and an online simulator for the engineers. The portal went live in the weeks before Micron’s marketing push at the Supercomputing 2014 trade show and seeded a user community for the new chip; explainer videos and an interactive trade-show demo carried the same story to the show floor.

The AP Workbench visual development environment: automata assembled from ANML elements on a canvas, with a palette of logic operators — the development environment: the chip’s native structures, visible and workable

Micron Automata Processor developer portal homepage with hardware, applications, software, and ecosystem sections — the developer portal at micronautomata.com, at launch

Online simulator running automata in the browser: symbol stream, playback controls, and a graph of states and connections — the online simulator: automata running in the browser, states and connections visible

technical analysis · interaction design · proposals & SOWs · developer tools

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