IEEE Awards Booklet - 2018 - 24

2018 ieee technical field awards

IEEE William E. Newell Power Electronics Award

IEEE Daniel E. Noble Award for Emerging Technologies

Sponsored by the IEEE Power Electronics Society

Sponsored by the Motorola Solutions Foundation

Rainer Marquardt

Rajiv V. Joshi

For development of the modular multilevel converter application in medium
drives and high-voltage DC transmission
systems

For contributions to predictive failure
analytics, VLSI memory design, and
technology

A milestone achievement in power electronics, Rainer Marquardt
pioneered the modular multilevel converter (MMC) concept,
which has revolutionized the capabilities of power conversion
technology. It has changed high-voltage DC (HVDC) conversion,
which is important for future applications including electronically
controlled transmission networks for long distances. MMC has become the most common type of voltage-source-controlled HVDC
due to its scalability from the megawatt up to the gigawatt range,
transformer-less operation, high eﬃciency, high reliability, and fault
tolerance. Developed by Marquardt in 2002, the MMC has become
important for medium-voltage drives, wind power and other applications, and regenerative energy sources. His MMC technology
was successfully applied in the Trans Bay HVDC underwater cable
connecting San Francisco, CA, to Pittsburg, CA. As a worldwide
standard, MMC topology has extended the application field and the
capabilities of power electronics significantly.
Marquardt is a professor with the University of Bundeswehr,
Munich, Germany.

Rajiv V. Joshi's innovations have revolutionized industrial techniques and products across many domains, including interconnect
process technology, circuits, SRAM design, technology modeling,
and CAD. He has overcome previously insurmountable barriers
to scaling. Joshi's development and commercialization of statistical methodologies for variability analysis of novel memories and
application of new technologies to SRAMs paved the way for
widespread industrial adoption of statistical techniques. His innovations to interconnect processes and structures for multiple
metallization technologies-aluminum, tungsten, and copper-
have been widely used in IBM memory and logic processes. His
developments have been broadly licensed and commercialized to
the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. They are engrained in
every facet of our modern lives: in servers; low-power, hand-held
devices; and the wearable computing market.
An IEEE Fellow, Joshi is a research staﬀ member at IBM T. J.
Watson Research Center,Yorktown Heights, NY, USA.

IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits
Sponsored by the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society

William S. Carter and Stephen Trimberger

For contributions to field-programmable gate array technology

William S. Carter and Stephen Trimberger were pioneers at
Xilinx, creating and refining an important new semiconductor product category-field-programmable gate-array (FPGA)
technology, now a multibillion-dollar industry. Carter saw that
Moore's Law would make FPGAs increasingly capable and useful
and developed eﬃcient circuits for implementing programmable
logic. He designed the Xilinx XC2000 and XC3000 FPGAs and
led the engineering eﬀort on later versions. Trimberger's experiments on the architecture of the fabric and its influence on the
performance of a user design as well as its impact on the design of
the silicon was crucial in developing eﬃcient FPGA architectures.
Many features of this approach are now standard for all program-

mable logic manufacturers. Carter and Trimberger helped form a
new industry with profound and beneficial societal impact. FPGAs are used in aerospace and defense; IC prototyping; audio/
video and image processing; automotive, professional, and consumer electronics; data-center and high-performance computing; industrial control; security and surveillance; medical systems;
and wired and wireless communications. Carter and Trimberger's
technical leadership, innovation, and vision have been critical to
making FPGAs as popular and important as they are today.
William S. Carter is retired in Los Gatos, CA, USA. An IEEE
Fellow, Trimberger recently retired from Xilinx and lives in Incline Village, NV, USA.

24 | 2018 IEEE awards bookLET

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