Mark Horowitz

Title:  Encapsulating Designer Knowledge: Improving Digital and Mixed Signal Design
Date:  February 10, 2011, at 3 p.m., in SF1105

For the past 40⁺ years society could count on the scaling of silicon technology to make information technology faster, lower power, and cheaper. Today we face two huge challenges. The first is that while silicon technology continues to scale, physical limitations mean that the energy and performance gains are modest. The second is through scaling we are now building incredibly complex systems, which commensurate design costs. The net result is a paradox of needing to build specialized chips to continue to scale performance, and having technology that is amazingly capable, but no one can afford the large (>$20M) upfront design costs to use it.

In this talk I will review my group’s research to reduce this large design cost by embedding designer knowledge in the designs created. For analog and mixed signal design, this involves making analog design more like digital design, with real reusable cells, and functional and electrical rules checking. For digital design this involves creating flexible building blocks and using them to create flexible chip designs that can generate the specialized instance desired. I will provide some examples from my group indicating the promise of this approach - including improving the energy efficiency of a H.264 encoder by 200x.

Bio: Mark Horowitz is the Yahoo! Founders Professor at Stanford University and the Chief Scientist at Rambus Inc. He is the Chairman of the Electrical Engineering Department, one of the largest departments at Stanford. He received his BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1978, and his PhD from Stanford in 1984. Dr. Horowitz has received many awards including a 1985 Presidential Young Investigator Award, the 1993 ISSCC Best Paper Award, the ISCA 2004 Most Influential Paper of 1989, and the 2006 Don Pederson IEEE Technical Field Award. He is a fellow of IEEE and ACM, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Horowitz's research interests are quite broad and span applying EE and CS analysis methods to solve problems in molecular biology to creating new design methodologies for analog and digital VLSI circuits. He has worked on many processor designs, from early RISC chips, to creating some of the first distributed shared memory multiprocessors, and is currently working on on-chip multiprocessor designs. Recently he has worked on a number of problems in computational photography. In 1990, he took leave from Stanford to help start Rambus Inc, a company designing high-bandwidth memory interface technology, and has continued work in high-speed I/O at Stanford. His current research includes multiprocessor design, low power circuits, high-speed links, computational photography, and applying engineering to biology.