1999 Technical Excellence Award
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| Lawrence Pileggi |
The following is the text of the presentation speech delivered by SRC Board of Director's Chairman, Sunlin Chou, at the awards ceremony held during TECHCON 2000.
Professor Lawrence Pileggi's work on "Simplified Inductance and Capacitance Extraction Algorithms" has been selected to receive this year's Technical Excellence Award.
Technology progress is proceeding as described in the ITRS. Shrinking dimensions and the accompanying higher frequencies now make wiring capacitance and inductance very important factors in the design of circuits and systems. However, existing capacitance and inductance extraction algorithms are too slow to be used on industrial-scale designs. This means we either ignore or loosely estimate these important parasitic effects which contribute to system noise and timing problems. Lacking good extraction tools, designers use conservative estimation techniques in order to assure functionality. However, such conservative design techniques do not achieve the speed and density requirements needed in the gigascale and gigahertz age.
Practical chip level inductance extraction has been elusive. Previous attempts have usually suffered from both long run times and inaccurate results. The feasibility of accurate, computationally efficient extraction has been demonstrated in the work of Professor Pileggi and his students. 3D extraction algorithms based on his work are in use in SRC member companies. It is estimated that the reduction in the number of layout iterations can save several months in time-to-market.
Lawrence T. Pileggi is professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He is well recognized internationally as a leader in design automation, simulation, modeling, and analysis of circuits and interconnects. His research interests include various aspects of circuit-level design automation and analysis.
Professor Pileggi is a "second-generation" recipient of the SRC Technical Excellence Award. He received his first award along with Professor Ronald Rohrer for work on asymptotic waveform evaluation based on his Ph.D. thesis. He has supervised over 30 graduate students and has been a leader or co-leader on 12 SRC-sponsored research tasks. Approximately half of these students are now employed at SRC member companies. Much of his work has been embodied in design and analysis tools now in use by SRC members. He is also a principal investigator in the Focus Center Research Program multi-university Gigascale Silicon Research Center.
It is with great pleasure that on behalf of the SRC Board of Directors, I award the 1999 Technical Excellence Award to Professor Lawrence Pileggi.
