University of Minnesota Professor Sachin Sapatnekar Honored for Excellence in Semiconductor Research
Contact: Rhonda Zurn, College of Science and Engineering, rzurn@umn.edu, 612-626-7959
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (03/14/2014) – The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), representing U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing and design, today presented its University Research Award – in consultation with Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) – to University of Minnesota professor Sachin Sapatnekar in recognition of his outstanding contributions to semiconductor research.
“We are pleased to recognize Dr. Sapatnekar for his trailblazing work in the field of semiconductor research,” said Dr. John E. Kelly III, IBM senior vice president, director of IBM Research, and 2014 SIA chairman. “Research is critical to sustaining the pipeline of discoveries that drive growth in the semiconductor industry and our economy. We commend Dr. Sapatnekar for his outstanding achievements.”
Dr. Sapatnekar holds the Distinguished McKnight University Professorship and the Robert and Marjorie Henle Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He is a member of The Center for Spintronic Materials, Interfaces, and Novel Architectures and co-leads the Theme 5: Spintronic Circuits and Architectures group.
He was chosen for the award because of his work in developing computer-aided techniques for the analysis and optimization of integrated circuits, with his most recent work covering CMOS technologies as well as spintronics. Specifically, Professor Sapatnekar’s research has made significant impact in verifying and optimizing the power delivery networks of central processing units (CPUs) and other system on chips (SoCs). Analysis techniques developed by Professor Sapatnekar and his research group have dramatically advanced this capability in the design community.
He has authored nine books and numerous papers in this area and has received six conference Best Paper Awards and a Best Poster Award, as well as the ICCAD Ten-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Award, an award that recognizes a paper that has had a significant impact ten years after its publication.
“Our mission at SRC is to seed innovation and help provide the people and ideas to keep the U.S. semiconductor industry competitive, and Dr. Sapatnekar is an ideal example of this collective effort,” said SRC President Larry Sumney. “We salute Dr. Sapatnekar for the role he has played in our university research engine that has made the U.S. the cradle of discovery and technology development.”
Dr. Sapatnekar has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design and as General Chair for the ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, the two top publication venues in his research area, as well as leadership roles (General Chair and/or Technical Program Chair) in the ACM International Symposium on Physical Design, the IEEE/ACM Tau Workshop, and the International Conference on VLSI Design. He was conferred with a Fulbright award as a Senior Researcher in Spain in the Fall of 2013, and held the D.J. Gandhi Visiting Professorship at IIT Bombay in early 2014. He has received the NSF Career Award and the Semiconductor Research Corporation Technical Excellence Award, and he is a Fellow of the IEEE.