About

The 2011 Clay-Wolkin Fellowship

The Jay Wolkin '99 and Clay Family Foundation Fellowship, named in memory of the famous and fun-loving mudder Jay Wolkin, was started in fall of 2006 and provides students opportunities to pursue basic and applied research initiatives in VLSI design within the context of the unique engineering program at Harvey Mudd College.

Below is information about the fellowship program and links to current fellowship research projects:

Projects 2011-2012

Jackson Adders

Team Members: Andrew Carter, William Koven, Tynan McAuley, and Paula Ning

Adding two numbers together is a common operation used in many different types of chips. As such, any optimizations to make adders faster or more efficient have profound consequences. Ling adders use an optimization that factors out complexity in the first stage of the adder, at the consequence of a more complex sum selection. This reduces the length of the critical path by one transistor. In 2009, Jackson generalized the Ling optimization to stages other than the first. This could potentially offer more speed improvements and an entirely new family of adder architectures. The Jackson team will investigate these architectures, using Design Compiler to test various designs. We can then compare energy-delay curves in an attempt to beat the standard adder produced by synthesis.

Shifters and Cryptography Accelerators

Team Members: Andrew Carter and Paula Ning

In previous semesters, the Clay-Wolkin fellowship has developed and fabricated shifter and Montgomery multiplier designs targeting low energy. They will be testing the second spin of the fabricated chip, and determining the efficency of these designs.

Investigating failure rates of registers in near-threshold operation

Team Members: Max Korbel and Dylan Stow

When digital circuits are operated with a lower-than-normal supply voltage, substantial savings in energy can be observed. However, this advantage comes at the price of increasing delay and decreasing reliability. The goal of this project is to investigate and characterize the failure and yield rate of registers as a function of the reduced supply voltage. Other institutions have conducted similar research into SRAM yield, but no studies exist yet specifically for registers.


Current Fellows

Andrew Carter Andrew Carter is a junior, at Harvey Mudd College. He joined the Clay-Wolkin Fellowship, when he was just a freshman. He manages the computing resources for the fellowship and is a member of the Shifters and Cryptography Accelerators team, at the same time. He was always interested in computers, and wrote programs before he even went to High School. Last summer he worked on developing a language at JPL, just because he could. He sometimes writes in programming languages that don't exist yet, just to see what would happen. The math he does is simultaneously both interesting and cool. He doesn't just play video games, he makes some. And he does all that, in his spare time. He is the most interesting man in South 351 B. He drinks often and when he does he drinks milk. "Stay hydrated my friends".
Max Korbel Max Korbel is an engineering major in the class of 2013 at Harvey Mudd College. He is interested in electrical engineering, robotics, and computer science. He has had internships at Naked Sky Entertainment as a video game programmer, MiniMed Medtronic as a programmer, and Intel Corporation as a power integrity engineer and tool developer. He also owns his own web design and management business. In addition to his research in the Clay-Wolkin fellowship, he has published research in robotics and monocular vision at Harvey Mudd with Prof. Zachary Dodds. At Mudd, he is a member of the underwater robotics club which competes in the international MATE competition. In the Clay-Wolkin fellowship, Max is investigating the failure rates of registers in near-threshold operation.
William Koven William Koven is an anonymous research fellow. His biography is a closely-held matter of national security which is not revealed on this webpage. The picture on the left is actually of a highly-classified robot stunt double. The cover story provided for him by the government, however, claims that he is a Senior Engineer who graduated high school from Phillips Academy Andover where he first gained a serious interesting in computer hardware by restoring a PDP-11/44. Morever, the cover story continues with the obviously fabricated claim that he spent the summer of 2009 continuing the highly classified work done by the 08-09 Intel clinic team and the summer of 2010 working at Advanced Micro Devices. In time, perhaps, the true biography of this shady fellow will become declassified piece by piece.
Tynan McAuley Tynan McAuley is an engineering major at Harvey Mudd College in the class of 2012, interested in computer engineering and computer science. His first exposure to computer engineering was in Harvey Mudd's Digital Design and Computer Architecture course, and he has be hooked ever since. Tynan joined the Clay-Wolkin Fellowship at the end of his Sophomore year and is a member of the Jackson Adders team. He spent the summer of 2009 researching the economics of large scale solar power with Professor Gary Evans, and the summer of 2010 developing software at Solyndra in Fremont, CA. Outside of his coursework, Tynan enjoys soccer, photography, hiking, and other outdoor activities.
Paula Ning Paula Ning is a junior engineering major at Harvey Mudd College who still needs to write her bio.
Dylan Stow Dylan Stow is a junior engineering major at Harvey Mudd College who still needs to write his bio.

Previous Fellows

2010-2011

2009-2010

2008-2009

2007-2008

2006-2007

Other Personnel

The Clays James and Andrea Clay are the parents of Jay Wolkin ('99), and wish that they had been smart enough to go to Mudd. That wish correlates to an understanding of the importance of the ability to do undergraduate research and the commitment to support it. Both are completing (yet another) Masters in sustainable community development after successful careers in business. They have ten brilliant grandchildren and hope that at least three will go to Mudd.
David Money Harris David Money Harris is an Associate Professor of Engineering at Harvey Mudd College. David received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1999 and his S.B. and M. Eng. degrees from MIT in 1994. His research interests include high speed CMOS VLSI design and computer arithmetic. He is the author or coauthor of CMOS VLSI Design: A Circuits and Systems Perspective, Logical Effort, and Skew-Tolerant Circuit Design. He holds ten patents, has written numerous papers, and has designed chips at Sun Microsystems, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Evans & Sutherland. He has also served as an expert witness in patent litigation. When he is not teaching or building chips, David enjoys mountain climbing and flying his Cessna.

More Information

Links

Questions or comments about the website? E-mail acarter+claywolkin@hmc.edu