IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Fall 2021 - 152

Research Program from 1985 to 1989,
and as Department Head from 1989 to
1999. He was the Dugald C. Jackson
Professor of Electrical Engineering
from January 2000 until his retirement
in June 2005. Even after his
retirement, he remained active, teaching
a course every term until fall 2018,
participating in faculty meetings, and
collaborating on research and educational
issues with other faculty. From
1996 to 1997, he served as president
of the National Electrical Engineering
Department Heads Association and,
in March 2000, received its Outstanding
Service Award.
One of Penfield's most significant
educational contributions at MIT
was the development of a course on
information, entropy, and computation,
offered jointly by the EECS and
Mechanical Engineering Departments
for almost 20 years. This course
helped make the second law of thermodynamics
more accessible to firstyear
students by treating entropy as
a form of information. Penfield cared
deeply about education in EECS,
articulating the importance of both
" the electron and the bit " in the past
and future evolution of the field. His
devotion to his students was fittingly
commemorated with the Paul L. Penfield
Student Service Award, which is
granted to undergraduate and graduate
students alike to honor his devotion
to the department.
Another lasting contribution is
Penfield's establishment of the master
of engineering (M.Eng.) degree as
an accessible and primary path for
MIT EECS undergraduates, following
(or integrated with) their bachelor's
degree. To address the chronic
congested curricula in the field, he
established a flagship five-year program
in MIT's EECS in which students
receive both bachelor's and master's
degrees. In the 1992 Frontiers in
Education Conference paper that he
coauthored [1], the authors wrote,
By reducing significantly the
time to the master's degree, we
expect to be able to raise significantly
the number of students
allowed into the program without
overloading either facilities
152
FALL 2021
Penfield in 2013 at MIT's EECS Celebrates, where the inaugural Paul L. Penfield Student Service
Award at MIT was announced.
or faculty. . . . [W]ith reduced
curricular congestion, we hope
to be able to redesign most of
our academic subjects so that
our master's graduate students
will be better prepared to contribute
immediately to the
organizational effectiveness of
technology-based industry in a
highly competitive world. . . .
The EECS M.Eng. program
has been in place for more
than two decades and is
currently the choice of
more than two thirds
of EECS undergraduates
(and nearly a fifth of all
MIT undergraduates), so
Penfield accomplished
these goals with flying colors.
Penfield was
tems Research Program, he also
spearheaded the establishment of
MTL, which allowed MIT to establish
a prominent position in silicon technology.
As associate head, he built
MIT's strength not just in ICs, but also
in the computer architecture that this
field of study enabled.
Penfield's wide-ranging research
Penfield was an
extraordinarily
researcher, and
mentor for all of
his life.
instrumental
in
building up MIT's activity in silicon
ICs. He played a key role in bringing
Lynn Conway, as a visiting professor,
to the MIT EECS Department in 1978
to teach the first very large-scale integration
(VLSI) system design course,
which culminated with studentdesigned
ICs that were fabricated by
Hewlett-Packard. This launched not
only a universally accepted syllabus
but also the concept of the multioutcrop
sharing and interpretation system
foundry. As associate head of the
EECS Department and, subsequently,
founding director of the MicrosysIEEE
SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE
dedicated educator,
interests included inquiry into solidstate
microwave devices
and circuits, noise and
thermodynamics, the
electrodynamics of moving
media, circuit theory,
computer-aided design,
A Programming Language
extensions, IC design automation,
the computer-aided
fabrication (CAF) of ICs, and the
equivalence of information and thermodynamic
entropy. His work with J.
Rubinstein [2] and, later, in collaboration
with Mark Horowitz (Horowitz's
account of the interaction is quoted
later in the article) [3] on the signal
delay in resistance-capacitance (RC)
tree networks set the upper and
lower bounds of signal delay in tree
networks, such as complex metal-
oxide semiconductor digital circuits.
This work is considered seminal by
many and has been extensively cited.
The article was awarded the IEEE Circuits
and Systems Society Darlington
Prize Paper Award in 1985.

IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Fall 2021

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