Sachin S. Sapatnekar
Professor

  

Area of expertise: Computer-aided design of VLSI circuits and systems

Education
Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, 1992, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, United States
M.S., Computer Engineering, 1989, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, United States
B.Tech., Electrical Engineering, 1987, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India

Contact information
Office: 4-153 Keller Hall
Telephone: (612) 625-0025
E-mail: sachin (at) umn.edu
Personal Web Site: http://www.ece.umn.edu/~sachin/

Honors/Awards
Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) University Research Award (2014)
Distinguished McKnight University Professor
Robert and Marjorie Henle Chair
SRC Technical Excellence Award
NSF CAREER Award
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems - Editor-in-Chief,  Jan. 2010-2012

Synopsis
My research is primarily in the area of computer-aided design (CAD) of VLSI systems. Advances in integrated circuit technologies allow us to build progressively larger systems, with increasing numbers of transistors.  On the other hand, circuit components, such as transistors and wires, shrink in size from one technology generation to the next. Under such a scenario, CAD techniques are essential, both to model physical effects at the nanoscale and to solve large-scale problems with large numbers of variables. The research in our group is centered around design automation for optimization and analysis, concentrating on timing, power and layout issues. Some specific problems that we have worked on in the recent past include thermal analysis, reliability, power grid analysis, and 3D integration. Our focus has been on being able to build practical algorithms that can provide accurate solutions with a reasonable amount of computation.

Selected publications
Y. Zhan, S. V. Kumar, and S. S. Sapatnekar, "Thermally-Aware Design,” Foundations and Trends in Electronic Design Automation", 2008.

C. J. Alpert, D. P. Mehta, and S. S. Sapatnekar, editors, Handbook of Algorithms for Physical Design Automation, CRC Press, New York, NY, 2008.

B. A. Goplen and S. S. Sapatnekar, "Placement of 3D ICs with Thermal and Interlayer Via Considerations", Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, pp. 626 – 631, 2007.

S. S. Sapatnekar, Timing, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, MA, 2004
 

H. Chang and S.S. Saptnekar, "Statistical Timing Analysis Considering Spatial Correlations Using a Single PERT-like Traversal," Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, pp.621-625, 2003.