Summer 1999 Newsletter

SPIE Trip to TI

In April, a group of seven students, accompanied by Professor Kenneth Goodson and senior research scientist Dr. Zhiping Yu, visited Texas Instruments's (TI) offices in Dallas, Texas, as CIS's most recent Student-Partner Information Exchange (SPIE) delegation.

The trip was hailed as a great success by all. The participating students were John Fan ("Soft Iterative Decoding for Magnetic Recording Systems"), Jung-Suk Goo ("High Frequency MOSFET Noise Simulation"), Hirad Samavati ("12.4mW CMOS Front-End for a 5GHz Wireless-LAN Receiver"), Ben Shieh ("Integration and Reliability Issues for Low Capacitance Air-Gap Interconnect Structures"), Per Sverdrup ("Sub-Continuum Simulations of Heat Transport for Compact Trans-istors"), Katelijn Vleugels ("Wideband High-Resolution Sigma-Delta Modulator for Communication Applications") and Xin Yi Zhang ("A Quasi-Mixed-Mode Approach to ESD Device Simulation and Substrate Resistance Scaling").

Dr. Zhiping Yu presented "PROPHET, A Platform for Next Generation TCAD Tools" and Professor Goodson presented "Thermal Engineering of Electronic Microstructures." On the night of their arrival, the group was treated to a dinner with some of TI's top executives, including Jack Kilby, inventor of the integrated circuit and founder of the Kilby Awards Foundation. The following day, the team toured the facilities, presented their research, and discussed topics of mutual interest with TI researchers and scientists. Their mission accomplished, the jet-set group was on a flight back to San Francisco that same evening. "We were very pleased to have this opportunity to visit with Stanford CIS students and faculty," said Dr. Yoshio Nishi, TI Senior Vice President of R&D. "We believe such interaction will further strengthen the collaboration between TI and Stanford (in research and education) and lead to a higher level industry-university partnership model." "TI was very happy to host the visit from CIS students and faculty," said Mr. Greg Herbst, who hosted and facilitated the visit. "We hope that our continued interaction will work to improve the research programs at Stanford and broaden the preparation of Stanford's excellent students for careers in companies such as TI." Dr. Zhiping Yu, of Professor Dutton's group, had many positive remarks of his own. "The visit went extremely well. The students (all of them!) did a fantastic job presenting their work, and TI made the visit a high-profile event." Dr. Yu was also pleased with the participation by executives and top research scientists at TI. "We were honored that Dr. Kilby himself joined us at lunch and had an inspiring chat with us." Dr. Yu concluded by saying that "the visit will definitely have a positive impact on our research at CIS."

In Their Own Words

"Overall I enjoyed the trip to TI, and found the program to be very well organized. There were many high-level managers in attendance at the welcome dinner and at the meeting itself, which was a good occasion to get to know them and find out what TI has been working on. I had the chance to meet briefly with the research group I had worked for two summers before. I would have welcomed a little bit more time at TI and a chance to visit with some different groups there. I'd like to add that riding in a white stretch limo to and from the airport was a very pleasant surprise." --John Fan

"The SPIE trip was a great experience. On the first evening, we had dinner with people from TI. I was able to sit with my FMA Mentor Dr. Ajith Amerasekera, whom I hadn't seen since I worked for TI in 1997. It was a good opportunity to catch up on things at TI and talk about my work. The next day, I was able to meet with him again, and we discussed some new experiments. I gave my seminar and was able to get good feedback from Ajith and my old boss at TI, Dr. Mi-Chang Chang. During this trip, I was able to talk to a lot of different people that are focused in my area of research and they seemed genuinely interested in what I was doing. Overall, the trip was a success. We even got to eat lunch with Jack Kilby, one of the pioneers in the integrated circuit industry." --Per Sverdrup

"It was a very interesting experience. The trip was very well organized. When we arrived in Dallas, we were taken to dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant, where we had the opportunity of meeting high-level management executives. At the presentations the next day, representatives from TI began by speaking on the management structure at TI and current projects being worked on. The Stanford technical presentations followed and all were very well prepared. We would have enjoyed more interaction with staff engineers, but our time there was limited. The trip was short but fruitful." --Hirad Samavati

"I think we all had a great SPIE experience. I was especially impressed by the presence of TI's top management at our welcome dinner as well as at our presentations and informal discussions. It was amazing to see that they made time during their busy schedules to meet with our Stanford team. A small number of circuit designers were present, but this was most likely because the presentations dealt mostly with technology and processing. On the other hand, the individual meetings I set up personally with circuit designers gave me a lot of valuable feedback for my research. Overall, it was a great and successful trip." --Katelijn Vleugels