NUS Presidential Young Professor Umang Mathur awarded Temasek-Presidential Young Professorship Grant

NUS Presidential Young Professor Umang Mathur has been awarded the Temasek-Presidential Young Professorship (T-PYP) grant for his research on safer and more secure hardware design. The project, conducted in collaboration with defence research stakeholders, brings programming-language theory and formal methods into hardware design – making implicit design assumptions explicit and machine-checkable. 

His research tackles a real gap: software engineers have powerful tools to catch bugs early, but hardware designers – work on systems just as critical – largely don’t. The languages and workflows used to design hardware still leave fundamental assumptions about timing, coordination, and module interaction unstated. As hardware grows more complex and more critical to domains such as defence, when a chip has a timing bug, you can’t just push a fix.

Central to the project is Anvil, a hardware description language Assistant Prof Mathur’s group have developed, in collaboration with NUS faculty members Associate Professors Prateek Saxena and Trevor Carlson. The initial version of Anvil allows hardware developers to express timing intent as a first-class element in RTL designs. With the T-PYP grant, Prof Mathur's team will extend this work into new type systems, compilation techniques, and tooling for verifying timing, communication, and security properties – while remaining compatible with existing hardware design workflows. The project begins in June 2026.