About

The 2009 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 2009

Multipliers

A multiplier, a module that multiplies two numbers, is a key component of any general-purpose processor, and is widely used in specialized applications as well. Given its widespread use and its common placement on the critical path, a great deal of research has been dedicated to the improvement of the energy and delay characteristics of multipliers. These improvements range from simple tweaks to the basic array structure to clever use of regular tree structures to save computational time to radically different concepts in multiplier design. However, many of these improvements share a common characteristic; namely, their proponents claim that each particular design choice is the best possible in terms of energy, delay, or both. These claims obviously cannot all be true. The multipliers group aims to develop an automated flow for the fair comparison of different multiplier architectures to evaluate these disparate claims. The team will employ SCOT, the Stanford Circuit Optimization Tool, to determine sizings for each different multiplier design in an unbiased way. The team can then compare energy-delay curves for the different designs and attempt to definitively resolve these competing claims.

Current Fellows

James Brown James Brown is a Senior Computer Science major at Harvey Mudd College. He began his study of digital engineering in Professor Harris's Digital Electronics & Chip Design seminar in the fall of his Freshman year, and continued on that spring to work with Max Smoot and Michael Saldena in the Multiple Output Static Logic research group. In the 2007-2008 school year, he researched sub-threshold modular exponentiation with Autumn Petros-Good, Matthew Weiner, Anu Kholi, and Andrew Danowitz. Prior to attending HMC, James spent thirteen years in the Fall River Public School District of Fall River, MA. He has worked as a member of the student staff for the Harvey Mudd Computer Science Department for a couple of years and was a Corporate Operations Engineering Intern at Google, Inc. during the summer of 2009. He is the webmaster and the administrator of our computing resources.
Becky Glick Becky Glick is a junior engineering major at Harvey Mudd college. For the past two years she has worked as an intern in the Microelectronics and Radiation Effects department at The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, CA. Her recent projects included assisting in the fabrication, testing, and analysis of molecular nanoelectronics and other submicron electrical devices including high electron mobility transistors, schottky diodes, and carbon nanotube field effect transistors. On campus, she is currently serving as the president of the HMC collegiate section of the Society of Women Engineers.
Julia Karl Julia Karl is a junior engineering major at Harvey Mudd College. As a Clay-Wolkin fellow, she will be working in cooperation with a group of graduate students from the University of Michigan on the minimum energy point while taking into account variability. She spent last summer as an intern at Opto 22, working on a FPGA design for interfacing with SSI sensors. Before becoming a fellow, she worked on the Sub-threshold RSA Encryption Project with a team from the fellowship.
Matt Keeter Matt Keeter is a junior engineering major at Harvey Mudd College, interested in electrical and computer engineering and robotics. He attended Atlanta International School before coming to Mudd, and participated in the FIRST robotics program as a member of team 1414. On campus, he is active in the dance community, and a member of the Claremont Colleges Ballroom Dance Company. As part of the Clay-Wolkin Fellowship, he will be working with several other fellows to investigate the properties of various multiplier designs.
Ben Keller Ben Keller is a senior engineering major at Harvey Mudd College with aspecialty in digital systems and computer architecture. He plans to attend graduate school after graduation from Harvey Mudd. In his junior year, Ben helped to design and implement a low-noise readout system for charge-coupled devices in telescopes. Over the summer, he worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, designing a test setup for measuring the reliability of power MOSFETs. In the Clay-Wolkin Fellowship, he worked last year developing and verifying a model for keeper sizing in domino circuits, and is leading a team this year to investigate the merits of different multiplier architectures. Ben’s extracurricular interests include student government, hiking, and politics.
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 Sophomore 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. In time, perhaps, the true biography of this shady fellow will become declassified piece by piece.
Austin Lee Austin Lee is a Senior engineering major at Harvey Mudd College. He was a student in Prof. Harris's freshman digital design seminar, and was a lab assistant for the class in his sophomore year. Austin spent the summer of 2008 interning for SRI International, and the summer of 2009 working for Raytheon. He is described by his peers as a "hoopy frood", and is said to be a really amazingly together guy.
Andrew Macrae Andrew Macrae is a member of the Harvey Mudd College class of 2011. In high-school he participated in the US FIRST program as a member of Team 246 at Boston University Academy. Andrew started chip design in the spring of 2007 working with several fellows on the sub-threshold RSA Encryption research group, and in the summer of 2008 he worked with Trevor Ashley on the development of a feedback control lab for E-102.

Previous Fellows

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

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