May 8, 2012 -- Mark Horowitz, chairman of Stanford University's Electrical Engineering Department, will offer a look at Digital Analog Design during the 49th Design Automation Conference (DAC), as part of the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) Distinguished Speaker Series. The talk will be held during lunch Tuesday, June 5, from 11:45 a.m.-1:30 p.m. in Room #303 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It is open to all DAC attendees on a first-come, first-served basis.

In his talk, Professor Horowitz will describe the advances in digital design tools over the last 30 years, contrasting the more modest progress in analog tools. He will illustrate digital tools' use of abstractions to allow them to validate that implementations match functional models and that the composition of cells matches the composition of the functional models. Professor Horowitz will explain why this is more difficult for analog circuits and outline how it can be done by illustrating ways to formally validate analog models, define analog fault models, and efficiently explore the effect of process variations.

In addition to his role as department chair, he is the Yahoo! Founders Professor at Stanford University and a founder of Rambus, Inc. Professor Horowitz is a fellow of IEEE and ACM and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Science. Dr. Horowitz's research interests span using electrical engineering and computer science analysis methods to problems in molecular biology to creating new design methodologies for analog and digital VLSI circuits. He received Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and a Ph.D. from Stanford.

Professor Horowitz's talk is organized by Joel Phillips of Cadence Design Systems and Technical Activities chair for CEDA.