Mark Horowitz Explained

Mark Horowitz
Birth Date:6 April 1957
Birth Place:Washington D.C., U.S.
Nationality:American
Field:Electrical Engineering, Computer Science
Work Institution:Stanford University
Alma Mater:Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stanford University
Doctoral Advisor:Robert Dutton
Thesis Title:Timing Models for MOS Circuits
Known For:Processors, VLSI design, high-speed links, light-field photography

Mark A. Horowitz is an American electrical engineer, computer scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur who is the Yahoo! Founders Professor in the School of Engineering and the Fortinet Founders Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.[1] He holds a joint appointment in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments and previously served as the Chair of the Electrical Engineering department from 2008 to 2012. He is a co-founder, the former chairman, and the former chief scientist of Rambus Inc.. Horowitz has authored over 700 published conference and research papers and is among the most highly-cited computer architects of all time.[2] He is a prolific inventor and holds 374 patents as of 2023.[3] [4]

Education

Horowitz received bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978. After graduating, he moved to Silicon Valley to work at Signetics, one of the early integrated circuits companies. After working for a year, he entered Stanford, and worked on CAD tools for very-large-scale integration (VLSI) design.[5] His research at Stanford included some of the earliest work on extracting the resistance of integrated circuit wires,[6] and estimating the delay of MOS transistor circuits.[7] He was advised at Stanford by Robert Dutton and graduated with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1984.[8]

Academic career

In 1984, Horowitz joined the Stanford faculty. At Stanford his research focused on VLSI circuits[8] and he led a number of early RISC processor designs, including MIPS-X.[9] His research has been in the fields of electrical engineering, computer science, and applying engineering tools to biology. He has worked on RISC processors, multiprocessor designs, low-power circuits, high-speed links, computational photography, and genomics.[10] [11] Horowitz and his research group at Stanford pioneered many innovations in high-speed link design, and many of today’s high speed link designs are designed by his former students or colleagues from Rambus. [12]

In the 2000s he teamed up with Marc Levoy to work on computational photography, research which explored how to use computation to create better pictures, often by using data from multiple sensors. This research also explored light-field photography, which captured enough information to allow a computer to reconstruct the view to an arbitrary viewpoint.[13] The need to capture light-fields to process led to the creation of the Stanford Camera Array, a system which could synchronize and collect images from 100 image sensors,[14] as well as work that eventually led to the Lytro camera, whose photographs could be refocused after they were captured.[15]

In 2006, Horowitz received the IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits "for pioneering contributions to the design of high-performance digital integrated circuits and systems".[16] In 2007, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his "leadership in high-bandwidth memory-interface technology and in scalable cache-coherent multiprocessor architectures."[8] In 2008, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[10] At the 2014 International Solid-State Circuits Conference, he presented his studies on the outlook for the semiconductor industry in Computing's Energy Problem (And What We Can Do About It).[17]

In 2018 Horowitz founded the AHA Agile Hardware Project at Stanford University and has led it ever since. The program aims to "enable a more agile hardware development flow" by creating "an open source hardware/software tool chain to rapidly create and validate alternative hardware implementations and a new open-source system ARM/CGRA SoC which will enable rapid execution/emulation of the resulting design." The project is funded by Intel's Science and Technology Center, DARPA, the National Science Foundation, Amazon Web Services, Meta Platforms Inc.,Apple Inc., Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Google.[18] He also helps lead Stanford's Quantum Fundamentals, ARchitectures and Machines initiative (Q-FARM) which aims to harness the expertise and facilities of Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to accelerate the development of quantum information science. [19]

Business

In 1990 Horowitz took a leave of absence from Stanford to work with Mike Farmwald on a new high-bandwidth DRAM design which, in April of that year, led to the formation of Rambus Inc., a company specializing in high-bandwidth memory technology. After working at Rambus for a year, he returned to Stanford and started a research program in high-speed input/output.[10] Video game machines were early adopters of this technology, with Nintendo 64 and PlayStation 2 the first two mass-produced products to use the company's DRAMs. Intel later adopted the company's RDRAM processor interface, and Rambus memory chips were used in PCs in the late 1990s.[8] [17] [20] Horowitz returned briefly to Rambus in 2005 to help start a research organization at the company and left the board of directors in 2011.[21]

Awards and honors

Publications

Books

Book chapters

Select Patents

External links

Notes and References

  1. Welcome from the Chair . ee.stanford.edu . 12 July 2023.
  2. Book: Mark Horowitz . 17 June 2023.
  3. Patents by Inventor Mark Horowitz . patents.justia.com . 17 June 2023.
  4. Rambus Patents – Key Insights and Stats . insights.greyb.com . 17 June 2023.
  5. Horowitz . Mark . The Art of Breaking and Making . IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine . Summer 2016 . 14–30 . 10.1109/MSSC.2016.2580258 .
  6. Resistance Extraction from Mask Layout Data . IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design . July 1983 . CAD-2 . 3 . 145–150 . 10.1109/TCAD.1983.1270032 . Horowitz . M. . Dutton . R.W. . 1760505 .
  7. Signal Delay in RC Tree Networks . IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design . July 1983 . CAD-2 . 3 . 202–211 . 1983ITCAD...2..202R . Rubinstein . J. . Penfield . P. . Horowitz . M. A. . 10.1109/TCAD.1983.1270037 . 15304459 .
  8. News: Kanakia . Rahul . Four professors elected to National Academy of Engineering . news.stanford.edu . 12 Feb 2007.
  9. Architectural Tradeoffs in the Design of MIPS-X . 4th International Symposium on Computer Architecture . June 1987 . 300–308 . 10.1.1.123.5694 .
  10. News: Seven university scholars elected fellows of eminent learned society . 30 April 2008.
  11. Book: Fuller . Samuel . The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level? . 2011 . National Academies Press . Washington, DC . 164 . 9780309159517 .
  12. News: Handy . Jim . Mark Horowitz . qfarm.stanford.edu . 2021.
  13. Ho . Ron . Enabling the Hardware for Computational Photography: Mark Horowitz Turned Ideas into Working Hardware Systems . IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine . 5 September 2016 . 8 . 3 . 52–56 . 10.1109/MSSC.2016.2580282 . 12910074 .
  14. Web site: The Stanford Multi-Camera Array . graphics.stanford.edu . 17 July 2018.
  15. News: Pierce . David . Lytro changed photography. Now can it get anyone to care? . The Verge . 22 April 2014.
  16. Web site: IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits Recipients, 2006 – Mark A. Horowitz . https://web.archive.org/web/20180718001353/https://www.ieee.org/about/awards/bios/pederson-recipients.html#2006---mark-a.-horowitz . dead . July 18, 2018 . IEEE.org . IEEE . 17 July 2018.
  17. News: Handy . Jim . Rambus Founder Opines on Semiconductor Industry's Future . Forbes.com . 11 Feb 2014.
  18. News: AHA Agile Hardware Project . stanford.edu . 2022.
  19. News: Leadership . stanford.edu . 2022.
  20. News: Manners . David . Rambus reported to be up for sale . Electronics Weekly.com . 10 July 2017.
  21. News: Neal . Dave . Mark Horowitz is leaving Rambus . https://web.archive.org/web/20120108022824/http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2131084/mark-horowitz-leaving-rambus . unfit . January 8, 2012 . The Inquirer . 8 Dec 2011.
  22. Web site: University Researcher Award . SRC.org . 17 July 2018.
  23. Web site: University Researcher Award . med.stanford.edu . 7 December 2022.
  24. News: Professor Horowitz of Stanford University Recognized with ACM/IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award . www.computer.org. 16 June 2022.
  25. News: Jim . Ormond . Stanford University Professor Receives the ACM - IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award for Contributions to Microprocessor Memory Systems . www.acm.org . 16 June 2022.
  26. Web site: Mark Horowitz . profiles.stanford.edu . 27 Dec 2023.

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