IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Summer 2016 - 36

Computer architecture, much like the rest
of the silicon revolution, has undergone
enormous transformations over the past few
decades, and hand-held compute systems we
casually store in our pockets today are
profoundly more powerful than the
mainframes of the past.
ASICs fabricated with the sponsorship
of companies like Silicon Graphics, Inc.
and LSI and then taught the team how to
package, test, and sort the chips that
resulted. He was equally at home at a dry
erase board drawing stick figures of layout to floor plan critical circuits, wielding a soldering iron to swap out a bad
connector, showing the students proper
oscilloscope techniques (hint: never use
the "auto-scale" button around Mark),
or grabbing a screwdriver to assemble
a chassis.
Finally, Mark embodied one of the
most under-appreciated virtues of a
faculty advisor: he pushed students
hard to finish their doctoral degrees. He
was an exacting mentor, but he worked
to ensure that students were driving
toward an actual conclusion to their
Ph.D. tenures. If he was one of your
advisors, you knew the weekly grilling, painful as it might be at times, was
bringing you closer to completion.

Final Thoughts
Computer architecture, much like the
rest of the silicon revolution, has undergone enormous transformations
over the past few decades, and the handheld computer systems we casually
store in our pockets today are profoundly more powerful than the mainframes
of the past. One of the hallmarks of this
progress has been a "virtuous feedback
loop" in which advances in all aspects of
computer technology become fundamental enablers for building newer, faster, and more powerful machines.
Mark and his students have been an integral part of this cycle, making significant and sometimes paradigm-shifting
contributions across the space. Here we

36

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discussed advances in energy efficiency and parallel distributed memory, and
we simply lacked the space to continue
the narrative into CAD tools, circuits,
microarchitectures, compilers, and
so on. But partly due to these contributions, each generation of computers has
been just powerful enough-in compute
performance, or storage, or interconnect
bandwidth, or richness of display-to
build the next generation of computers. This feedback loop has allowed
the engineering community to repeatedly bootstrap design after design and,
thus, put incredibly powerful systems
in large data farms, in our cars, in our
pockets, and inextricably woven into
the fabric of everyday life.

References

[1] R. Gonzalez and M. Horowitz, "Energy
dissipation in general purpose microprocessors," IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol.
31, pp. 9, Sept. 1996.
[2] R. Gonzalez and M. Horowitz, "Supply
and threshold voltage scaling for lowpower CMOS," IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits,
vol. 32, pp. 8, Aug. 1997.
[3] D. Patil, O. Azizi, R. Anantharaman, R. Ho,
and M. Horowitz, "Robust energy-efficient adder topologies," in Proc. IEEE
Symp. Computer Arithmetic, 2007.
[4] S. Galal and M. Horowitz, "Energy-efficient
floating-point unit design," IEEE Trans.
Computers, vol. 60, pp. 7, June 2010.
[5] B. Amrutur and M. Horowitz, "Speed and
power scaling of SRAMs," IEEE J. SolidState Circuits, vol. 35, pp. 2, Feb. 2000.
[6] K. Mai, T. Mori, B. Amrutur, R. Ho, and M.
Horowitz, "Low-power SRAM design using half-swing pulse-mode techniques,"
IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 33, pp. 11,
Nov. 1998.
[7] K. Mai, T. Paaske, N. Jayasena, R. Ho, W. Dally,
and M. Horowitz, "Smart memories: A modular reconfigurable architecture," in Proc. Int.
Symp. Computer Architecture, 2000.
[8] G. Wei and M. Horowitz, "A fully digital,
energy-efficient adaptive power supply
regulator," IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol.
34, pp. 4, Apr. 1999.
[9] R. Ho, K. Mai, and M. Horowitz, "The future of wires," Proc. IEEE, vol. 89, pp. 4,
Apr. 2001.

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

[10] R. Ho, K. Mai, and M. Horowitz, "Efficient
on-chip global interconnects," in Proc.
IEEE Symp. VLSI Circuits, 2003.
[11] O. Azizi, "Design and optimization of
processors for energy efficiency: A joint
architecture-circuit approach," Ph.D.
dissertation, Stanford University, CA,
2010.
[12] D. Lenoski, J. Laudon, K. Gharachorloo, W.
Weber, A. Gupta, J. Hennessy, M. Horowitz, and M. Lam, "The Stanford DASH multiprocessor," IEEE Computer, vol. 25, pp. 3,
1992.
[13] J. Kuskin, D. Ofelt, M. Heinrich, J. Heinlein, R. Simoni, K. Gharachorloo, J. Chapin, D. Nakahira, J. Baxter, M. Horowitz, A.
Gupta, M. Rosenblum, and J. Hennessy,
"The Stanford FLASH multiprocessor," in
Proc. Int. Symp. Computer Architecture,
1994.

About the Authors
Ricardo E. Gonzalez received the B.S.,
M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical
engineering from Stanford University,
California. He was a member of founding teams at Tensilica and Stretch,
where he led the development of configurable and extensible processors.
He has also worked at Intel, VMware,
and Pure Storage. In the fall, he plans
to pursue an M.S. degree in ecosystems
and climate change from Imperial College London.
Jeffrey Kuskin received an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth
College and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in
electrical engineering from Stanford University, California. From 1997 to 2000, he
designed large-scale distributed shared
memory multiprocessors at Silicon
Graphics. From 2000 to 2004, he developed wireless networking chip sets at
Atheros Communications. Since 2004,
he has been at D.E. Shaw Research,
designing special-purpose hardware
to accelerate molecular dynamics simulations of proteins and other biological macromolecules.
Ron Ho (ronho@ieee.org) received
his undergraduate, master's, and
doctoral degrees from Stanford University, California. He is currently
director of Interconnect IP at Altera,
now part of Intel Corporation. From
2003 to 2014, he was with Sun Microsystems (later Oracle Corporation),
and from 1993 to 2003 he was with
Intel Corporation.



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