Ebrahim M. Songhori

AI for Chip Design.
Founding Member of Technical Staff at Ricursive Intelligence.

About

I am a founding member of technical staff at Ricursive Intelligence, working on AI for chip design. Previously, I was a member of the AlphaChip team at Google Brain and DeepMind, contributing to foundational research on AI-driven chip design published in Nature. My work spans differentiable programming, physical design, and timing analysis for semiconductor chip design.

Experience

Founding Member of Technical Staff — Ricursive Intelligence 2025 – Present

AI for Chip Design.

Staff Research Engineer — Google DeepMind 2023 – 2025

Member of Google DeepMind GenAI's AI for AI chip team. Advanced the state of the art in AI/ML for semiconductor design through differentiable and learning-based approaches to physical design and timing analysis.

Senior Software Engineer — Google DeepMind 2019 – 2023

Contributed to foundational research on ML-driven chip design as part of Google Brain's ML for Systems team. Designed a novel graph convolutional architecture enabling generalization across chip placement tasks — a core innovation of AlphaChip.

Software Engineer — Google Shopping Ads 2017 – 2019

Designed and delivered scalable infrastructure for a two-tower deep learning retrieval system, improving ad latency and relevance.

Education

Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Rice University, TX — 2015–2017
Thesis: "TinyGarble: Efficient, Scalable, and Versatile Privacy-Preserving Computation Through Sequential Garbled Circuit."
Supervisor: Prof. Farinaz Koushanfar (UC San Diego)
M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Rice University, TX — 2012–2014
B.Sc. in Computer Engineering
University of Tehran, Iran — 2007–2011

Selected Publications & Patents

Awards & Honors

PhD Student FellowshipRice University ECE Graduate Fellowship (2012)
ValedictorianRanked 1st, Computer Engineering Class of 2011, University of Tehran
Silver MedalPhysics National Scientific Olympiad for High School Students (2006)
Ranked 5thComputer Engineering National Scientific Olympiad for College Students (2009)