Prof. Kaushik Roy and alumnus Jaydeep Kulkarni win 2022 SRC Innovation Award
Kaushik Roy, Edward G. Tiedemann Jr. Distinguished Professor of ECE in Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has received the 2022 SRC Innovation Award. The honor showcases coalitions or initiatives that are taking inventive approaches as they navigate a complex and changing semiconductor environment.
Roy won the award with Jaydeep Kulkarni, assistant professor at the University of Texas, Austin, and Purdue ECE alumnus (ECE PhD ’09). The duo received the recognition for their work Memory cell with built-in process variation tolerance. Kulkarni explored ultra-low-voltage IC design topics this work during his PhD under the guidance of Roy. They successfully demonstrated a pioneering memory bitcell topology based on the Schmitt Trigger principle that can directly replace conventional 6 Transistor SRAM bitcell. Incorporating Schmitt Trigger in an SRAM topology was a new concept in the Solid-State Circuits Society. This work described the principles of sub-threshold design very clearly, explained novel circuit techniques, and discussed the valuable design trade-offs. Silicon prototype showed successful operation down to 160mV.
This research has influenced many subsequent low-voltage designs, sense amplifier designs, and hardware security circuits, as evidenced by more than 900 citations and two US patents. The research has been recognized with the 2015 IEEE Transactions on VLSI systems best paper award, Purdue ECE outstanding doctoral dissertation award, SRC’s inventor recognition awards (2x), SRC TECHCON best paper in session award, ISLPED design contest award, and the Intel Foundation Ph.D. fellowship award to Kulkarni. The work has been patented and has received recognition in the past from IEEE, ISLPED, Purdue University, and Intel.
The award was presented at the 2022 SRC Techcon Conference held September 18-20 in Austin, Texas.