Rate My Professor Benjamin Carrion Schafer

Benjamin Carrion Schafer is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Dallas within the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. Since 2023, he has served as Assistant Dean for Graduate Student Success in the school. He joined The University of Texas at Dallas in 2016. Prior to this, he was an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and worked as an R&D engineer at NEC Corporation Central Research Laboratories, contributing to their commercial High-Level Synthesis tool development. Dr. Carrion Schafer earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, in 2003, an MSc from Birmingham City University in 1998, and a BEng from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain, in 1997. He is also the founder and director of highX Technologies.

His academic interests center on High-Level Synthesis design space exploration, reconfigurable computing, thermal-aware VLSI design, approximate computing, and hardware security. As director of the DARClab at The University of Texas at Dallas, his research advances practical implementations in these areas. Key publications include "High-Level Synthesis Design Space Exploration: Past, Present, and Future" (IEEE Design & Test, 2019), "S2CBench: Synthesizable SystemC Benchmark Suite for High-Level Synthesis" (DATE, 2014), "What to Lock? Functional and Parametric Locking" (DAC, 2017), "Machine Learning Predictive Modelling High-Level Synthesis Design Space Exploration" (2012), and recent contributions such as "Approximate Computing in High-Level Synthesis: From Survey to Practical Implementation" (2026) and "HAMMER: Hardware-aware Runtime Program Execution Acceleration through runtime reconfigurable CGRAs" (2025). His scholarship demonstrates significant influence, evidenced by citation metrics on Google Scholar. In recognition of his contributions, he received the MVP Career Service Faculty Award from the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering in 2023. He holds patents, including Japanese Patent 2012-522281.