Focus on new faculty: Azadeh
Davoodi
ntegrated circuits are chips that perform multiple
functions. Most electronics rely on integrated circuits, from a standard
desktop printer to a fully equipped BlackBerry. As electronics become
more multi-purpose, integrated circuits become more complex. Those complexities
are the main interest of Azadeh
Davoodi, the department’s new assistant professor. Davoodi’s
area of research is electronic design automation, or facilitating integrated
circuit design through algorithms and software tools. “Particularly,
I’m interested in challenges with today’s complex integrated
circuits,” she says.
Circuits today have to be multi-taskers. For example,
a cellular phone that includes a PDA, a camera, and music and video
capabilities has all of its functions integrated on one chip, yet fits
in a pocket. “To do this, the size of the transistors on the chip
gets scaled down. Currently these sizes are in the range of decananometers,
or ten billionths of a meter,” says Davoodi. As transistor size
shrinks, challenges grow. Among them, power and temperature dissipation
rise, lag time increases, and reliability declines.
Aside from the issues in circuit performance, problems
arise in manufacturing on such a small scale. Circuit manufacturing
always has errors, Davoodi says, but as the product becomes tinier,
the process produces errors to the extent that the circuits’ behavior
deviates significantly from the expected.
“I am interested in addressing these challenges
related to integrated circuit design for nanometer-sized transistors,
developing robust algorithms that can address these deviations, and
more importantly, implementing solutions into software that will enhance
the process of integrated circuit design for today’s needs,”
says Davoodi.
In developing tools for design, Davoodi starts with
properties common to all integrated circuits. She then turns the abstract
specifications of integrated circuit design into detailed implementation
specific to the applications the chips will have. The process proceeds
in a series of steps that can be followed for different applications.
“At every step, we try to automate it or implement
it into tools,” says Davoodi. “These ideas embed well into
tools that can be applied at the industrial scale. The software that
I develop is usually for academic purposes, but the point is for the
ideas and the algorithms we develop to be embedded into industrial-scale
tools.”
Electronic design automation captured Davoodi’s
attention during her undergraduate studies at the University of Tehran
in her native Iran. “It’s a very practical research area.
It’s not pure theory; you can take theory from other areas of
electrical engineering and apply it,” she says. Inspired by several
students who had gone before her, she decided to pursue graduate work
in the United States, earning her master’s and PhD degrees from
the University of Maryland.
Since joining the UW-Madison faculty in 2006, Davoodi
has discovered many things to enjoy about the college, the students
and the city. “I’m loving the environment more every day,”
she says. She appreciates the students’ enthusiasm, the university’s
research facilities and its encouragement of cross-disciplinary collaboration,
her colleagues’ expertise—even the variety of cheese produced
by Wisconsin’s dairy farmers. “The local cheese is wonderful.
That’s one of the things I really like,” she says.
“I really love my job. I’m honored to
be at Wisconsin. The students are very good. The computer engineering
faculty are very friendly. I couldn’t ask for more.”
