This week is Padmini Gopalakrishnan, Senior Director, FPGA Implementation Software and AI products at AMD India. She leads a team of over 90 engineers who work on software tools that help customers take designs from a high-level description and implement them on adaptable devices.
Growing up, Padmini Gopalakrishnan lived in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and Saharanpur. The Senior Director, FPGA Implementation Software and AI products at AMD India leads a team in Hyderabad, working on logic synthesis, placement and routing and device modelling among other tasks, crucial in the design of the company’s FPGA Software and Tools.
To Padmini, a stable and conducive environment at home was encouraging for both her sister and herself. It enabled them to be curious and detail-oriented, she says. “My father was an engineer, my mother is a scientist who later pursued a PhD in management. My father and maternal grandfather were also good at repairing and building things, so from a very young age, I always thought this was a very cool thing to do,” she tells
Padmini recalls getting a home computer at the age of 10, an 8-bit Commodore 64, on which she learnt to type, played games and wrote programs in Basic. In school, she liked science and math, though it took her a while to decide what she wanted to do. “My parents were very supportive of my interests.
At the same time, they always emphasised the importance of being financially independent, so I chose the practical route of taking science and math in Grade XI and XII and postponing the final decision about a career by a year or so,” she says. In high school, she was inspired by her Physics teacher, Gopa Sen and around the middle of Grade XI, was sure she wanted to do something that focused on the subject.
When she got through JEE, IIT-Madras seemed like a natural choice, since it also gave her the option to pursue her interest in Carnatic music in Chennai. After graduating, she went on to pursue her MS in Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin
