Date: 21/02/2012

IEEE individual award winners in 2012

IEEE Frederik Philips Award 2012 goes to Chih-Yuan (C. Y.) Lu, an engineer, scientist, and entrepreneur who has contributed significantly to Taiwan's chip fab industry.
Lu was recruited in 1989 to join Taiwan's Electronic Research and Service Organization/Industrial Technology Research Institute (ESRO/ITRI) to implement the country's largest and most ambitious research and development project. In his role as chief director general, he was the architect of the National Submicron Project, which resulted in a critical revolution in Taiwan's semiconductor industry. The goal was for Taiwan to catch up to the state-of-the-art semiconductor technology. In less than five years, Taiwan went from a lagging position in the world semiconductor industry to a leading contributor. Under Lu's guidance, the project provided Taiwan with its own dynamic random access memory (DRAM) mass-production capabilities and 8-inch wafer process technology to offer the world.

The confidence from the success of the National Submicron Project led to further investment in Taiwan's semiconductor industry. Lu co-founded Vanguard International Semiconductor in 1994, which was Taiwan's first technology independent and commercially operated memory company. Lu also founded Ardentec in 1999 for wafer-level integrated circuit testing. The start-up's quick success has been used by the Harvard Business School as case-study material. After joining Macronix International in 1999, Lu has led that company to many innovations in strategy, nonvolatile memory technology and project operational management, taking it to one of the most profitable memory companies in the world.

2. IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award:
Behzad Razavi, High-Speed Circuit Design Pioneer, To Receive 2012 IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award In Solid-State Circuits

Razavi's goal for two decades has been to push the envelope of high-speed communication circuits, improving the speed of communication transceivers using standard CMOS technology. The new architectures, circuits and devices developed through his research have paved the way for many of today's integrated wireless and wireline/fiber-optic systems. Also a prolific writer, Razavi has produced award-winning and highly cited reference papers and invaluable textbooks that have greatly influenced the field of CMOS circuit design.

Razavi's work in the area of wireless transceivers pioneered the concept that innovations at the architecture level can greatly relax the design at the circuit level. He was an early proponent of direct conversion for wireless transceivers, which is widely used in many wireless systems including cellular phone handsets. With his students at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Razavi explored new architectures for radio-frequency (RF) applications from 900 MHz to 60 GHz, introducing, for example, "synthesizer-friendly" transceivers. These architectures have substantially simplified the design of their constituent oscillators and frequency dividers, leading to 60-GHz receivers and transmitters that consume the lowest reported power levels.

Razavi is also known for applying RF concepts to wireline/fiber-optic circuits. Razavi and his UCLA students were the first to demonstrate 10-Gb/s (in 2001) and 40-Gb/s (in 2003) clock and data recovery circuits, laser drivers and equalizers using CMOS technologies. This led to designing higher-speed wireline transceivers using CMOS, with the benefit of lower manufacturing costs.

Razavi has written five text books and edited two others, contributing to the education of students and engineers around the world. His "Design of Analog CMOS Circuits" (McGraw-Hill, 2001) has been adopted by hundreds of universities, translated into Chinese, Japanese and Korean and won the McGraw Hill First-Edition of the Year Award in 2001. In 2003, Razavi was named one of the top 10 authors in the 50-year history of the ISSCC for his many influential and award-winning papers.

3. 2012 IEEE Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award:
Ronald A Rohrer, Innovator of Circuit Simulation Tools, has won the 2012 IEEE Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award

Contributions to Simulation and Design Automation Have Enabled the Advancements Seen in Today's Integrated Circuit Technology

7 February 2012 - Ronald A Rohrer, an engineer and educator whose innovative circuit simulation and optimization techniques have provided the time and cost efficiencies enabling advancements in integrated circuit production, is being honored by IEEE with the 2012 IEEE Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award. IEEE is the world's largest technical professional association.

The award, sponsored by the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, recognizes Rohrer for fundamental contributions to circuit simulation, circuit design optimization and electronic design automation. The award will be presented on 20 February 2012 at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, Calif.

Considered one of the preeminent researchers during the 1960s for his work on design optimization, Rohrer's contributions to improving integrated circuit production by incorporating circuit simulation techniques have spanned over 40 years. Rohrer realized early on that circuit simulation was crucial to integrated circuit design if the industry was to progress in size reduction and complexity of integrated circuits. Circuit simulation uses mathematical models to simulate the behavior of a circuit design before investing the time and expense of actually building the circuits. Rohrer's accomplishments have made a major impact on the proliferation of electronic design automation (EDA) tools and their widespread use by industry.

What is perhaps Rohrer's greatest achievement occurred during the early 1970s when he developed a series of courses on circuit simulation at the University of California, Berkeley. Through these courses, Rohrer and his students created the CANCER (Computer Analysis of Nonlinear Circuits, Excluding Radiation) simulation program. This program utilized concepts from Rohrer's earlier work on adjoint networks for design optimization and enabled unprecedented efficiency and circuit size capability. CANCER evolved into the SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) tool, considered today to be the industry standard for integrated circuit design simulation.

During the 1980s, Rohrer's logic synthesis work led to the creation of the Socrates logic synthesis tool and eventually to the formation of Synopsys, Inc., one of the world's largest EDA companies. In 1988, while at Carnegie Mellon University, Rohrer introduced the asymptotic waveform evaluation algorithm. This algorithm enables highly efficient timing simulation of integrated circuits containing large numbers of parasitic elements. It has formed the basis for industry-wide interconnection reduction techniques for efficient integrated circuit delay calculation.

An IEEE Life Fellow and member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, Rohrer was the founding editor of the "IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems" and also served as president of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society in 1987. Rohrer's awards include the IEEE Education Medal (1993), the NEC Computer and Communication Prize (1996) and the EDA Consortium Phil Kaufman Award (2002). Rohrer received his bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and his master's and doctorate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. Rohrer is University Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Source: IEEE.ORG