Solid State Circuits Society

March 22, 2007

Our speaker was   Dr. Mark Horowitz (Stanford Univ.), and the topic of his presentation was ” Rethinking Analog: Digitally Driven Analog Design.”

Abstract

As we continue to scale CMOS technology, more chips integrate a small amount of mixed signal circuitry on their large digital dies. Since transistors are getting worse, and the specs for the analog are getting tighter, all these blocks use numerous cheap digital gates to “improve” their analog performance. This talk will discuss a new research program we are starting at Stanford University to try to rethink analog design.    The first step is to realize that digital correction is here to stay, and is pretty cheap. So the first research question is can we build mostly “digital” analog subsystems, and are there power/design time advantages in this approach. Since there will be some analog circuitry that remains, the second research question is to try to create a design system that makes using mixed-signal blocks more like using digital macros — each cell comes with a validation script, and a set electrical rules checkers that ensure the design assumptions are actively checked every time it is used. Our goal in this section is to create robust mixed signal cells that can be used in many different designs. More importantly this tool should provide management feedback on when redesign of an analog cell is really needed, and prevent simple chip errors from reappearing when a new designer redesigns an existing block.

Biography

Mark Horowitz is the Associate Vice Provost for Special Programs and the Yahoo! Founders Professor of the School of Engineering at Stanford University, and Chief Scientist at Rambus Inc. He received his BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1978, and his PhD from Stanford in 1984. Dr. Horowitz is the recipient of a 1985 Presidential Young Investigator Award, an IBM Faculty Development Award, the 1993 ISSCC Best Paper Award, the ISCA 2004 Most Influential Paper of 1989, and the 2006 IEEE Solid-State Circuits Award. He is a fellow of IEEE and ACM.

Dr. Horowitz’s research area is in digital system design, and he has led a number of processor designs including MIPS-X, one of the first processors to include an on-chip instruction cache; TORCH, a statically-scheduled, superscalar processor that supported speculative execution; and FLASH, a flexible DSM machine. He has also worked in a number of other chip design areas including high-speed and low-power memory design, high-bandwidth interfaces, and fast floating point. In 1990, he took leave from Stanford to help start Rambus Inc, a company designing high-bandwidth memory interface technology. His current research includes multiprocessor design, low power circuits, high-speed links and new graphical interfaces.

Some photos from the event.

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