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Digital Analog Design

Mark Horowitz

Abstract

The past 30 years have seen an enormous growth in the power and sophistication of digital design tools, while progress in analog tools has been much more modest. Digital tools use many abstractions to allow them to validate implementations match the functional models, and the composition of cells matches the composition of the functional models. While there are many reasons why this is more difficult for analog circuits, it can be done. To prove this point, this talk presents how to leverage the fact that the result surface of analog designs are smooth to create ways to formally validate analog models to instances, define analog fault models, and even efficiently explore the effect of process variations.

Biography

Professor Horowitz’s initial work focused on designing high-performance digital systems by combining work in computer-aided design tools, circuit design, and system architecture. Dr. Horowitz’s current research interests are quite broad and span using EE and CS analysis methods to 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 updating both analog and digital design methods, low energy multiprocessor designs, computational photography, and applying engineering to biology.

Mark Horowitz Headshot
Mark Horowitz
Stanford University
EEB 105
20 Jan 2015, 10:30am until 11:30am