The paper presented a radically new strategy for so-called "rare event" failure statistics in memory designs. Modern silicon devices with atomic dimensions don't have deterministic behaviors: everything worth modeling is a messy smear of probability. How then to determine if statistical variations compromise reliability? In a multicore design with 100 million bits of cache memory, a one-in-a-million error rate is disastrous. One must guarantee rates of better than 1-in-a-billion.
Conventional simulations for such "rare event" failures are intractably slow. Rutenbar and Singhee showed how ideas synthesized from data mining and the mathematics of extreme value theory could be combined to provide speedups of 10-10,000X for these critical problems.
Rutenbar is the head of the Department of Computer Science and the Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering. He has worked on tools for custom circuit synthesis and optimization for over 20 years, and on custom silicon architectures for speech recognition for the last half dozen years.
In 1998, Rutenbar co-founded Neolinear Inc. to commercialize the first practical synthesis tools for analog designs. He served as Neolinear's Chief Scientist until its acquisition by Cadence in 2004. He is the founding director of the U.S. National Focus Research Center for Circuits and System Solutions -- called "C2S2"--a CMU-led consortium of 19 U.S. universities and over 50 faculty funded by the U.S. semiconductor industry and U.S. government to address future circuit challenges.
He has won many awards over his career, including the 2001 Semiconductor Research Corporation Aristotle Award for excellence in education, and most recently, the 2007 IEEE Circuits & Systems Industrial Pioneer Award. His work has been featured in venues ranging from "EE Times" to "The Economist" magazine. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.
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Contact:Rob Rutenbar, Department of Computer Science, 217/333-3373.
Writer: Jennifer La Montagne, associate director of communications, Department of Computer Science, 217/333-4049.
If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.