March 31, 2005 --The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department is extremely proud of Assistant Professor Yehia Massoud's National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award.  Massoud proposed an integrated automation strategy for interconnect design in his winning proposal. The proposal presents a new paradigm for mixed-signal that provides excellent solutions for the immediate and the long-term future of integrated circuits.

Due to aggressive technology scaling and increasing operating frequencies, interconnect has become the main performance limiting factor in integrated circuits. Consequently, interconnect synthesis plays a vital role in facilitating today's mixed-signal designs, but current design automation techniques fail to include deep sub-micron interconnect effects directly into the synthesis process, says Massoud.  To promote synthesis strategies that handle the increased complexity of mixed-signal nanoscale integrated circuits, we are developing a new interconnect synthesis paradigm that evaluates the circuit signal integrity and performance during interconnect synthesis.

In the new paradigm proposed by Dr. Massoud, interconnect in mixed-signal systems is modeled, optimized and synthesized taking all aspects of the system's interconnect into account including analog interconnect structures and integrated components as well as interconnect in digital portions of the design. To facilitate and develop the new system-oriented interconnect synthesis paradigm for mixed-signal nanoscale ICs, Dr. Massoud and his research group will research and create analytical modeling, optimization and synthesis methodologies that facilitate generalized design automation in integrated mixed-signal and system-on-chip designs. The system-oriented interconnect synthesis strategies will utilize statistical modeling methodologies incorporating inductance to produce layout that meets design constraints.

The CAREER award is NSF's most prestigious honor for junior faculty members. This program was established in 1995 to help top performing scientists and engineers early in their careers to develop their contributions and commitment to research and education.

Yehia Massoud is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Rice University.  He is the principle investigator of the Rice Automated Nanoscale Design Group, RAND. He received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999. He was a member of the Technical Staff at the Advanced Technology Group at Synopsys Inc., Mountain View, CA from 1999 to 2003. His current research interests are in developing automated design strategies that integrates powerful multi-scale computational techniques which are used to rapidly develop, verify, and implement high-performance Systems-On-Chip, as well as emerging applications in Nanotechnology and Biotechnology.