Eby Friedman, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Rochester, received the IEEE Circuits and Systems Charles A. Desoer Technical Achievement Award at a ceremony last May in Beijing, China. The IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society created the award to honor an individual's career of consistent, exceptional, and original technical contributions.
Friedman's achievements in the field of high-performance integrated circuit design include a high citation rate, over 400 publications, 16 books, 12 patents and many examples of how his research has impacted the semiconductor industry, including numerous cases of industrial product development.
"I very much appreciate the community's recognition of the work coming out of my research laboratory here at the University," said Friedman. "It represents a great deal of effort by many hard working and capable graduate students over several decades. It's been a deep and rewarding experience for me to work with these students, many of whom are now leading researchers at many universities and industrial labs across the country and throughout the world."
The award was presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, the world's premier conference of researchers in the fields of theory, design, and development of microelectronic circuits and systems.
Friedman has been a member of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rochester since 1991. He is the director of the High Performance VLSI/IC Design and Analysis Laboratory. He received his B.S. degree from Lafayette College and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from University of California, all in electrical engineering. He was the director of the Center for Electronic Imaging Systems between 1999 and 2008.
Among the books Friedman authored or edited are Clock Distribution Networks in VLSI Circuits and Systems (IEEE Press, 1995) and High Performance Integrated Circuit Design (McGraw-Hill Publishers, 2012).
Friedman received some recent attention for his group's development of a 3-D integrated circuit to synchronize a vertical stack of multiple layers of processors, unlike standard two-dimensional integrated circuits where the flow of data is only achieved horizontally. Other research achievements are in the areas of on-chip power delivery, high-speed synchronization, and high-speed interconnect, all focusing on the general area of high-performance integrated circuits.
The Charles A. Desoer Technical Achievement Award is one of the oldest awards given to a member of the IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society, with the first award received by Irwin W. Sandberg in 1985. The award includes a plaque and $1,000.
The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) is the world's largest technical professional society.