ECE Team Takes Third Place in IC Design Challenge Phase One

ECE graduate students Abhishek Jajoo, John Reinke and Leon Wang have been awarded the 3rd prize in the Phase 1 of the 2007-2008 SRC/SIA IC Design Challenge. Their contest entry integrates their Ph.D. research in RF MEMS devices and circuits into an implementable design for "A Tunable Multiband RF MEMS Transceiver Front-End." (More info...)

Blanton named director of CSSI

Professor of ECE Shawn Blanton is the new director of the Center for Silicon System Implementation (CSSI). Blanton succeeds Larry Pileggi, Tanoto Professor of ECE, who served as director since 2000.

CSSI is focused on all aspects of chip design spanning the spectrum from system-level architectures to analog/digital circuits, to the physics and the modeling of the complexities found in semiconductor manufacturing.

Blanton joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1995 after earning a doctorate in computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan. In 2006, he was awarded an Emerald Award for outstanding leadership in recruiting and mentoring minorities for advanced degrees in science and technology. The Emerald Awards, sponsored by Science Spectrum magazine, are recognized as the premier awards for African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and Native Americans working in the research sciences.

Blanton is the leader of the Carnegie Mellon Laboratory on Integrated Systems Test, which uses the physical design description of integrated circuits to identify and characterize defects. Research results from his lab are currently being employed by companies that include Intel and IBM, and currently being commercialized in the Carnegie Mellon spin-out TestWorks.

CSSI has 18 participating faculty from the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering, and over 60 graduate students.

CSSI was formed in 2000 upon the infrastructure of the Center for Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) which grew out of the Semiconductor Research Corporation-Carnegie Mellon Research Center for Computer-Aided Design founded in 1982.

In his role as director of CSSI, Pileggi re-focused the center on silicon system design and optimization. This led to the center's participation in two FCRP-funded multi-university research centers: The Center for Circuit & System Solutions (C2S2) and The Gigascale Systems Research Center (GSRC). In addition, the CSSI is supported by DARPA, NSF and industry.

Singhee, Wang, Calhoun and Rutenbar win Best Paper Award at 2008 VLSI Conference

C2S2 researchers Amith Singhee and Rob A. Rutenbar (CMU), and Jiajing Wang and Benton H. Calhoun (University of Virginia) are winners of the 2008 Best Student Paper Award at the 21st International Conference on VLSI Design. Their paper, "Recursive Statistical Blockade: An Enhanced Technique for Rare Event Simulation with Application to SRAM Circuit Design," extends the teams highly visible work on ultra-fast analysis of memory circuits to handle extremely difficult "rare event" statistics.

Mitra, Perrott and Rutenbar speak at DARPA Reliability Workshop

Subhasish Mitra (Stanford), Mike Perrot (MIT) and Rob Rutenbar (CMU) gave invited talks at the DARPA LIBRA Workshop on Reliable System Design from Unreliable Components, held in Arlington, VA. Mitra spoke about early failure diagnosis in digital systems. Perrot spoke about design solutions for analog/RF circuits based on scaled digital devices; Rutenbar spoke on fast techniques for SRAM reliability analysis. Mitra works in the C2S2 Digital Circuits & Systems Theme. Perrot works in the C2S2 Analog Circuits and Interfaces Theme. Rutenbar is Director of C2S2 and also works in the C2S2 Silicon Infrastructure Theme.

ACM Fellow

ECE Professor Donald Thomas was appointed an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow "for contributions to computer-aided design of integrated circuits and systems." The ACM Fellows Program recognizes and honors outstanding members for their achievements in computer science and information technology and for their significant contributions to the mission of the ACM, reported their website.

Most Influential Work of the DATE conference

A paper written by Associate Professor of ECE Radu Marculescu and his former graduate student Jingcao Hu (Ph.D. 2005) was selected for a book featuring the most influential work over 10 years of the Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) conference. The research, entitled "Exploiting the Routing Flexibility for Energy-Performance Aware Mapping of Regular NoC Architectures" was selected for 2003; only three papers were chosen from each year. (More info...)

Singhee and Rutenbar Win DATE Best Paper Award

CMU researchers Amith Singhee and Prof. Rob Rutenbar have the 2007 Best Paper Award at the Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) conference. DATE is Europe's premier conference for IC design tools. Their paper, "Statistical Blockade: A Novel Method for Very Fast Monte Carlo Simulation of Rare Circuit Events and its Application," discusses how to dramatically accelerate the analysis of statistical reliability in scaled memory circuits. This work is part of the C2S2 Silicon Infrastructure Theme.

Joint C2S2/GSRC Workshop on Test held at ITC 2007

A special workshop on testing, jointly organized by Shawn Blanton of C2S2 and Tim Cheng of GSRC, was held in conjunction with the International Test Conference (ITC) in Santa Clara, CA. Talks from across FCRP universities (UCSB, Texas A&M, GA Tech, Florida, Stanford, CMU) focused on problems in some of the more difficult domains of testing: analog, RF, millimeter wave, reliability issues, and MEMS.

FCRP Center Directors Rutenbar, Rabaey and Wang speak at NSF Workshop on Nanoelectronics

FCRP Center Directors Rob Rutenbar (C2S2), Jan Rabaey (GSRC) and Kang Wang (FENA) all spoke at the NSF Workshop on Nanoelectronics, held in Washington, DC this week. Organized by NSF Program Manager Pinaki Mazumder, the workshop brought together researchers from across the nanodevices, nanoelectronics, and nanoCAD disciplines to share ideas for where the field should evolve.

Rob Rutenbar gives keynote talk at ASPDAC07

CMU Prof. Rob Rutenbar gave they keynote talk at the 2007 Asia South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASPDAC) in Yokohama, Japan. His talk, entitled "Next-Generation Design and EDA Challenges: Small Physics, Big Systems, Tall Toolchains" focused on challenges in devices, circuits, systems, and tools, as we continue to scale CMOS.

Larry Pileggi Wins Industrial Impact Award from GSRC

CMU Prof. Larry Pileggi has been awarded the 2007 Richard Newton GSRC Industrial Impact Award, which acknowledges work from the FCRP Gigascale Systems Research Center (GSRC). This inaugural award, named in memory of Richard Newton, the founding director of the GSRC and former dean of the College of Engineering at U.C. Berkeley, is in recognition of research that is "at least five years old and has had significant industrial impact."An industrial panel selected Pileggi's research entitled "Via Programmable Regular Gate Arrays for Manufacturability," which was reported at the GSRC annual review in 2002. Other Carnegie Mellon affiliated faculty and students who received this award with Pileggi are Herman Schmit, Veerbhan Kheterpal, Aneesh Koorapaty, and Kim Yaw Tong. This honor is one of two new annual awards that were first presented during this year's GSRC Annual Symposium. Pileggi is a founding member of the C2S2 Executive Committee, a former member of GSRC, and currently leads the C2S2 Silicon Infrastructure Theme.

C2S2 Workshop on SRAM Design Held at MIT

A C2S2-sponsored workshop on issues in scaled SRAM design, organized by MIT Prof. Anantha Chandrakasan and CMU Prof. Rob Rutenbar attracted over 50 attendees to the meeting, held at MIT. Speakers from academia (UVa, Berkeley, CMU, Purdue and MIT) and industry (AMD, IBM, Intel, TI, and Xilinx) convened to share ideas about future SRAM architectures that must work at the most aggressively scaled CMOS nodes.

Wojciech Maly Wins SRC Aristotle Award for Outstanding Teaching

C2S2 researcher Wojciech Maly of CMU is the 2007 winner of the prestigious Aristotle Award for innovative teaching from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (parent of the Focus Center Research Program, and C2S2). The award was presented at the SRC TechCon meeting, on Sept. 11 in Austin, Texas.

Wojciech Maly Wins SRC Aristotle Award for Outstanding Teaching

C2S2 researcher Wojciech Maly of CMU is the 2007 winner of the prestigious Aristotle Award for innovative teaching from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (parent of the Focus Center Research Program, and C2S2). The award was presented at the SRC TechCon meeting, on Sept. 11 in Austin, Texas.

Graduate Student Fellowship Established in Memory of Alumna

ECE remembers alumna Margarida Jacome, who passed away on May 25 after battling cancer for several months. Margarida was an ECE Professor and Temple Foundation Fellow at The University of Texas (UT) at Austin. She earned her Ph.D. in ECE at Carnegie Mellon University in 1993 and received B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Technical University of Lisbon in Portugal. Her research focused on embedded computing, hardware/software co-design, and high-level synthesis.

To commemorate Margarida Jacome's passion for her research and her students, the ECE Departments at both Carnegie Mellon and UT Austin have established a joint graduate student fellowship in her name.

"Margarida was one of the most energetic, positive energy persons who I have ever met. She was the ideal academic colleague, and simply the best friend one could have," said Larry Pileggi, Tanoto Professor of ECE at Carnegie Mellon.

"She was a very vibrant person who you just liked instantly," remembered Pileggi. She remained devoted to her students throughout her illness: "After Margarida learned that she had terminal cancer, her primary concern was to work with her graduate students who were closest to graduation to finish their theses."

Pileggi met Jacome after he graduated from Carnegie Mellon with his Ph.D., the year before she started at the university, under the guidance of then Department Head (and later Dean of the College of Engineering) Steven Director as her research advisor. As students, Pileggi and Jacome shared similar research interests and both were affiliated with the Center for Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) at Carnegie Mellon, which preceded the Center for Silicon System Implementation (CSSI), which Pileggi now directs.

When Jacome graduated from Carnegie Mellon, Pileggi was a faculty member at UT Austin. He was very impressed by her work and recruited her for a software engineering position. As part of the UT Austin faculty, Jacome received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. She was an associate editor of the *IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (IEEE TCAD)* and guest edited a special issue of the *ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS)* on power aware embedded computing.

Recently, Jacome was a member of the executive committee of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), serving as the nano-initiative chair last year. Additionally, Jacome worked on the technical program committees of many other conferences and won several best paper awards. Her paper "Exploring Performance Tradeoffs for Clustered VLIW ASIPs" was included in the book "The Best of ICCAD - 20 Years of Excellence in Computer Aided Design."

"We are all deeply shocked at her passing on but we are left with fond memories of her presence, character, hard work, and technical prowess - she was loved by everyone who came across her," wrote Anthony Ambler, Chairman of the ECE Department at UT Austin, in a news release.

Contributions to the fellowship in Jacome's memory may be made out to "The University of Texas," marked "For Margarida," and mailed to:

Anthony P. Ambler
1 University Station C0803
ENS Room 236
Austin, TX 78712-0240"

Awards at the IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference (DAC)

Several faculty members from the ECE Department won awards at the 44th Annual IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference (DAC) on June 4-8 in San Diego. DAC is the premier electronic design automation (EDA) and silicon solution event.

Rob Rutenbar won the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Industrial Pioneer Award, Randal Bryant received the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, and Donald Thomas won an ACM/SIGDA Distinguished Service Award. Radu and Diana Marculescu's paper on "Voltage-Frequency Island Partitioning for GALS-based Networks-on-Chip" was nominated for a Best Paper Award; the research was co-authored with ECE graduate students Umit Ogras and Puru Choudhary. Only 15 papers were nominated out of the 161manuscripts accepted (713 were submitted).

Diana Marculescu served as the ACM/SIGDA representative on the executive committee and sat on the strategic planning and the tutorial committees; she was also on the program committee along with Radu Marculescu and Rob Rutenbar.

Many of our alumni have remained friends and colleagues over the decades, and during the Center for Silicon System Implementation (CSSI) alumni and friends reception at the San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina on June 5, guests enjoyed catching up with old friends. Our Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) liaisons are also invited to the gathering.

Startup weaves 'fabric' for IC design

Two companies spun-off from ECE research, Fabbrix Inc. and PDF Solutions Inc., are collaborating on a project to refine circuit technology, aiming to substantially exceed silicon performance at 65 nanometers and below. Fabbrix was founded by Larry Pillegi, Tanoto Professor of ECE; Director, CSSI. Andrzej Strojwas, Keithley Professor of ECE, co-founded PDF Solutions.