Venkat K.R. ChiluvuriThe IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing Best Paper Award is presented to the authors of that paper considered by the Transactions’ Editorial Staff and reviewers to be the most outstanding paper published during the year. The Award is based on the accuracy, originality, and importance of the technical concept, as well as the quality and readability of the manuscript. The Best Paper is also based on the immediate or potential impact that this work will have on the overall semiconductor manufacturing industry.
The Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing Best Paper Award, presented at the annual Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference and Workshop, recognizes the on-going partnership of this conference and the IEEE.
The Editorial Staff is pleased to announce that the paper entitled "Layout Synthesis Techniques for Yield Enhancement" by V.K.R. Chiluvuri and I. Koren has been recognized as the best paper published in the 1995 Transactions. This paper, that appeared in the May issue, has been chosen because it represents a novel method to apply yield enhancement techniques at a high level of design abstraction. The techniques discussed enable the IC to be desensitized to point defect related yield loss without increasing the die area during the layout synthesis phase of IC development. The techniques described in this paper have been used in a commercially available CAD framework. As integrated circuit features continue to scale into the deep submicron region, novel tools and techniques for evaluation and optimization of product yields continue to have a significant cost impact.
Venkat K.R. Chiluvuri
Venkat K. R. Chiluvuri received the B. Tech degree in electronics and communication from the JNTU College of Engineering, Kakinada, India in 1982, the M. Tech degree in Electrical Engineering form the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 1984 and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1995. He is currently a Senior Staff Engineer at Motorola, Austin, TX. From 1984 to 1990, he was with Wipro Information Technology Ltd., Bangalore, India. From 1993 to 1994, he worked at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. His research interests include layout synthesis, CAD for yield and manufacturability, and VLSI design.
Israel Koren
Israel Koren received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and D.Sc. degrees, all in electrical engineering, from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, in 1967, 1970 and 1975, respectively. He is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Previously, he was with the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He also held visiting positions with the University of California, Berkeley, University of Southern California, Los Angeles and University of California, Santa Barbara. He has been a consultant to several companies including IBM, AMD, Intel, DEC, National Semiconductor and Tolerant Systems. His current research interests are fault tolerant architectures, models for yield and performance, floor planning of VLSI chips and computer arithmetic. He published extensively in several IEEE Transactions and has over 100 publications in refereed journals and conferences. He was guest co-editor for the IEEE Transactions on Computers special issue on high-yield VLSI systems, April 1989. Since January 1992, he served on the editorial board of this Transactions. He also served as a program committee member for numerous conferences. He was the General Chair of the 1996 IEEE Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI systems (DFT96) Boston, MA, November 1996 and the General Chair of the 1996 Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT96), Boston, MA, October 1996. He has edited and co-authored the book, Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI Systems, Vol. 1, 1989, (New York, Plenum). He is the author of the textbook, Computer Arithmetic Algorithms, Prentice-Hall, 1993.
Gary C. Cheek
Analog Devices, Inc.
Wilmington, MA