Nigel Drego

Nigel Drego is co-founder and CTO of Quadric, where he defines the company’s processor architecture and compiler strategy. He is the chief architect of the Chimera® General-Purpose Neural Processing Unit (GPNPU) and its companion graph compilation toolchain, which together enable unified execution of CNNs, transformers, and emerging AI workloads on a single programmable architecture.

Nigel’s work focuses on tightly integrated hardware–software co-design, spanning ISA definition, dataflow architecture, memory hierarchy design, and compiler optimization for heterogeneous AI graphs. Under his leadership, Quadric has developed a compiler-driven execution model that balances programmability with deterministic performance for edge inference workloads.

Prior to founding Quadric in 2016, Nigel co-founded a high-efficiency bitcoin mining company, where he architected large-scale compute systems optimized for throughput and power efficiency. He holds a PhD from MIT, with research spanning parallel computing systems and high-performance architectures.