Athens · Hamburg

Dimitrios Kafetzis

Systems architect and researcher, working where embedded systems, networks and AI meet.

I design the hardware and software of resource-constrained systems, from PCBs and RTOS firmware to inference distributed across edge devices. I lead the IoT department at DeepSea Technologies, am completing a PhD at AUEB on partitioning neural networks and LLMs for the edge, and build SynapticOS, an AI-native operating system for microcontrollers with on-die NPUs.

Dimitrios Kafetzis giving a conference talk
WiOpt 2025 · Linköping
15+years across hardware and software
12papers in IEEE, ACM and IFIP journals and conferences
8funded research projects, EU and national programmes
5patches merged upstream in Zephyr RTOS

Now

What I'm working on

Industry

IoT Department Director, DeepSea Technologies

The embedded platform behind HyperPilot, DeepSea's DNV type-approved autonomous speed-control system: Yocto-based Linux distributions, wireless sensor networks, and compliance with IEC 60945, IEC 61162-450, IEC 61174, IEC 62923, IEC 62443 and IACS E26/E27.

Research

PhD, defence planned for December 2026

Partitioning DNNs and LLMs for low-latency inference across resource-constrained edge devices, at AUEB with Prof. Iordanis Koutsopoulos. Every result is measured on the Distributed Inference Testbed. Latest result: HeadSplit, IEEE SPAWC 2026.

Open source

SynapticOS

An inference-first RTOS for Cortex-M33 microcontrollers with on-die NPUs, built on Zephyr for the NXP FRDM-MCXN947. Three architecture papers on arXiv; phase 5 of 6 complete.

Zephyr Technical Contributor badge, The Linux Foundation
Open source community

Upstream contributions to Zephyr RTOS

Bug fixes reproduced on the FRDM-MCXN947 and sent upstream: build system and sysbuild, NXP MCX board and devicetree support, flash and USB drivers, driver tests. Ten pull requests in October 2026, five merged so far. Recognised by The Linux Foundation with the Zephyr Technical Contributor badge. Read what I learned.

Selected work

Systems I build and maintain

All projects →
Edge AI · RTOS

SynapticOS

AI-native operating system for microcontrollers. Tensor-aware memory arena, NPU-aware scheduling and model lifecycle as OS services rather than application code.

  • C
  • Zephyr
  • Cortex-M33
  • eIQ Neutron NPU
Distributed LLM inference

HeadSplit

Attention-head partitioning and inter-layer speculation so every device runs each layer's attention in parallel. Reference code for the SPAWC 2026 paper, on Raspberry Pi clusters over WiFi.

  • PyTorch
  • RPC
  • Llama
  • IEEE SPAWC 2026
Edge AI · Library

EdgeNN

Zero-allocation C11 inference library for ARM Cortex-M and Cortex-A: Dense, Conv, LSTM, GRU and Transformer layers with INT8 quantisation and a deterministic graph runtime.

  • C11
  • ARM
  • INT8
  • TinyML
Robotics

Fieldproof

Multi-domain emulation for ground, aerial and surface robots. Unmodified ROS 2 stacks run in containers against Gazebo, driven by scenario tests with pass/fail assertions.

  • ROS 2
  • Gazebo
  • PX4 / ArduPilot
  • Docker
Maritime

NMEA Simulator X

Cross-platform NMEA 0183 and Signal K vessel data simulator. Streams position, heading, depth, wind, engine and AIS data over serial, TCP, UDP and WebSocket.

  • C++20
  • Qt 6
  • NMEA 0183
  • Signal K
PhD testbed

Distributed Inference Testbed

The experimental platform of my thesis: five Raspberry Pi 4 boards, an edge server and the NNPM web application that runs partitioned DNN and LLM inference experiments end to end under controlled network and compute conditions.

  • Python
  • Raspberry Pi
  • tc-netem
  • Flask

Writing

Latest from the blog

All articles →

Research

Recent publications

All publications →
IEEE SPAWC 2026

HeadSplit: Attention Head Partitioning and Inter-Layer Speculation for Distributed Inference at the Edge

D. Kafetzis, I. Koutsopoulos

arXiv 2026

SynapticOS: An Inference-First Runtime Architecture for Neural Processing Units on Resource-Constrained Microcontrollers

D. Kafetzis

IEEE/IFIP WiOpt 2025

Large Language Model Partitioning for Low-Latency Inference at the Edge

D. Kafetzis, R. Khalili, I. Koutsopoulos

Experience

Where I've been, in brief

Full timeline →
2023 – nowAthens

IoT Department Director · Embedded Systems Architect

DeepSea Technologies (Nabtesco Group)

2019 – nowAthens

Lead Research Engineer · Teaching Fellow

Athens University of Economics and Business, Research Center and Department of Informatics

2017 – 2019Athens

R&D Department Director · Systems Architect

Plaython Inc.

2014 – 2016Athens

Embedded Systems & Software Design Engineer · Project Manager

Prisma Electronics SA

2012 – 2014United Kingdom

Electronics Design Engineer

University of Leeds, I3S Ultrasound Group · deSoutter Medical Group