Faculty Advisor

Mark Horowitz

Mark Horowitz received his BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1978, and his PhD from Stanford in 1984. Since 1984 he has been a professor at Stanford working in the area of digital integrated circuit design. While at Stanford 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 and Flash, a flexible DSM machine. He has also worked in a number of other chip design areas including high-speed 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.

Consulting Professors

Jaeha Kim

Jaeha Kim (S'94-M'03) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1997, and received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 1999 and 2003, respectively. Prior to joining Stanford, he was with True Circuits, Inc. (2001~2003), Seoul National University in Korea (2003~2006), and Rambus, Inc (2006~2009). His research interests include high-speed/low-power circuit design and verification methodologies for analog and mixed-signal circuits.

Steve Richardson

Stephen Richardson got his PhD from Stanford a long time ago, and now he's back. In the meantime, Dr. Richardson has worked at Sun Microsystems and HP research labs, where he eventually headed up a large team of hardware-oriented computer architects. Dr. Richardson was a cofounder of the original incarnation of MicroMagic (www.micromagic.com), a processor tool and design consulting firm. Dr. Richardson has published several papers and patents, including a patent covering the concept of multiplication by zero and one (US patent 5262973). If you multiply a number by zero and get zero as a result, you owe me a nickel.

Staff

Jim Weaver

Current Students

Fernando Amat

Fernando Amat was was born in Barcelona, Spain. He graduated from Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) with a degree in Mathematics and another degree in Telecomunnication Engineering in 2004. He came to Stanford in September, 2004 to start his PhD in Electrical Engineering. He works with professor Mark Horowitz in the are are of bioimaging and statistical learning applied to cryo-electron tomography. Professor Daphne Koller is his second advisor.

Zain Asgar

Zain Asgar received his undergraduate degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota with Summa Cum Laude and High Distinction. He is currently pursuing his PhD under Prof. Mark Horowitz at Stanford University in the area of multiprocessors. He has worked at PMC-Sierra working on ASIC design. He is currently working at NVIDIA Corporation on the design of next generation graphics processors.

Omid Azizi

Omid Azizi has been an MS/PhD student at Stanford since September 2004, and has been working Professor Mark Horowitz since 2005. His current research focus is on the design and optimization of processor architectures for energy-efficiency, and he is also a member the Chip Generator project. Through internships, Omid has spent time at Intel's Microarchitecture Research Lab, and also at Altera, as part of the physical synthesis group. Prior to coming to Stanford, Omid studied at the Unversity of Toronto, receiving his B.A.Sc. in Computer Engineering in 2004.

Limor Bursztyn

Limor Bursztyn is interested in both Electrical Engineering (with an emphasis on signal processing) and Neuroscience. She is currently involved in the Massively Parallel Brain Imaging project, led by Prof. Mark Schnitzer. In this project, a system that will enable performing two-photon imaging in 100 fruit flies (Drosophila) simultaneously is being designed. With the help of consulting Prof. Don Stark, Limor is working on the data acquisition, control and interface parts of the system. Limor has also been working with Prof. Thomas Clandinin (Neurobiology), on developing statistical signal processing techniques for using the acquired data to infer how the fly brain analyzes visual stimuli and uses the information to modulate behavior. Limor's PhD studies are funded by a Fulbright Science and Technology fellowship. Prior to starting her PhD in EE at Stanford, she received a BSc and MSc in Biomedical Engineering from Tel-Aviv University.

Han Chen

I was born in Taiwan, but grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii. I went to University of Michigan at Ann-Arbor for bachelors and masters in electrical engineering from 1996~2000. I worked at Hal Computer Systems (Fujitsu) after graduation, and then at Synopsys till now, implementing mixed-signal intellectual properties, low-power processors and system-on-chips. I've been a corporate student at Stanford since 2005, working to get a Ph. D. while being fully employeed. Apart from work and school, I have diversified interests. I love sports/activities that involve speed, which explains why I went sky diving and have a motorcycle license. I worship food; I dreamed of Yelping across San Francisco one day. I play tennis as regularly as time allows. I enjoy listening to music and playing musical instruments in my meager spare time. I've been building my own music recording studio as a side project for the past few years.

Sameh Galal

Sameh Galal: received BS in electronics engineering and computer science from the American university in Cairo, MS in electrical engineering from Stanford University where he is currently pursuing PhD. His research interests include: VLSI, low power design, floating point units and computer architecture.

Metha Jeeradit

Metha received his BS and MEng in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University in 2001 and 2002 respectively. He started his PhD program at Stanford in Fall 2002 before working at Rambus between 2004-2008 designing circuits for high speed links and working on circuit design methodologies. He is now working with Prof. Horowitz under the RAD initiative focusing on circuit optimization area.

Frances Lau

Frances is interested in applying techniques from circuit design, VLSI, and computer hardware to biomedical applications. She is currently focusing on molecular imaging, working on the design and development of a breast cancer imaging PET (positron emission tomography) system. This project is done in collaboration with the Molecular Imaging Instrumentation Lab at Stanford. She completed her B.A.Sc in EE at the University of Toronto in 2005 and her MSEE at Stanford in 2007, and is now an EE PhD candidate at Stanford.

Sabrina Liao

Sabrina received her B.A.Sc in Engineering Science (EE option) from the University of Toronto in 2008 and is currently an MS/PhD student working under the supervision of Professor Horowitz. Prior to coming to Stanford, she has had research experience in areas of multimedia communication, quantum mechanics and DCO design. In addition, she has worked at Gennum on ASIC verification and testing. Her research interests include analog/mixed-signal circuit design, optoelectronics and CMOS integration, high speed links and design methodologies. She is currently working on an ADC project.

Byong Chan Lim

I received B.S. and M.S. degrees in electronic engineering from Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea, in 1997 and 2002, respectively. I am currently working toward the Ph. D. degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University. From 2003 to 2007, I had been working on analog IP developement for LG electronics.

Farshid Moussavi

Farshid is doing research on algorithms for cryo electron tomography with Prof. Mark Horowitz and Prof. Daphne Koller in Electrical Engineering at Stanford. His research interests include computer vision, probabilistic inference, machine learning, optimization, applications to biological imaging problems, as well as signal processing hardware/system architecture. He is a PhD candidate in Stanford EE department, and holds an MSEE from University of California at Berkeley as well as a BSEE (Summa Cum Laude) from University of Idaho. He has spent some time in industry prior to coming to Stanford in 2005 to pursue his PhD. He has been involved in the design of numerous networking and signal processing ASICs at Cisco Systems, Aptina Imaging, HP, and some startups. More recently he has consulted for Apple Computer. He is the author of 7 patents (2 granted and 5 pending).

Ofer Shacham

Ofer is a PhD student at Stanford University’s EE department. His fields of research, under the advisory of Prof. Mark Horowitz, include Parallel Computer Architectures, ASIC design and verification, and High Performance Computing. He holds a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Tel-Aviv University. Prior to coming to Stanford, Ofer was working at IBM Labs in Israel, on ASIC design and verification, for high performance computing. Ofer's experience also includes 5 years of active service in an elite Israeli Navy unit.

Pete Stevenson

Pete is a Ph.D. student at Stanford University working in the field of circuit design, under the direction of professor Mark Horowitz. He aspires to develop innovative design tools for digital circuits. He is interested in closing the gap between a design implemented by HDL synthesis and a design optimized by exhaustive customization. Hailing from Tulsa, OK, Pete attended the U.S. Naval Academy from 1996 to 2000. After being commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Navy, he attended Stanford to obtain an MSEE (2002). Following this, he served on board a nuclear powered submarine, the USS Los Angeles (SSN-688) stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Subsequent to the tour at sea, Pete taught a basic network analysis class and an introduction to communications systems class at the U.S. Naval Academy, from 2006 to 2008. Pete is married and lives with his wife, Siejen, in Menlo Park, CA. His hobbies include surfing, golf, and reading.

Eino-Ville Talvala

Eino-Ville works with Prof. Horowitz and Prof. Marc Levoy on computational photography, specifically focusing on removing glare from high-dynamic-range photographs. He is also helping out with the Camera 2.0 project, and in the past has worked with projector and camera arrays, 3D displays, and measuring light transport in a scene. He received his undergraduate degree from the California Institute of Technology, where he was involved in asynchronous VLSI research.

Megan Wachs

Megan Wachs has been a MS/PhD student at Stanford since 2005. Her research interests include VLSI design and verification, and parallel architectures. In 2006 she started helping with the verification of the Stanford Smart Memories CMP, and is now working on the Chip Generator Project. She has worked as an intern at Cryptography Research, Inc, in San Francisco, as well as at Celestica, Shanghai. She received her BS from Brown University in 2005 in Electrical Engineering.

Gordon Wan

Gordon received his BS in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005, and his MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2007. He is currently a PhD candidate under Prof. Mark Horowitz at Stanford University. He has received the James F. and Mary Lynn Gibbons Fellowship, the Stanford Graduate Fellowship, and the Pan Wen Yuan Scholarship. He ranked 2nd in Stanford PhD Qualifying Exam. His research interest is in CMOS image sensor, digital imaging, and solid-state devices.

Alumni