Stanford Engineering
VLSI Group

Research

We use electrical engineering and computer science analysis methods to solve problems and to create new design methodologies for analog and digital VLSI circuits.

Validation Tools

Digital Systems

Improving validation productivity by providing automatic verification and debugging tools for hardware generator frameworks. Two major projects: automatic FSM verification and source-level debugging.

Validation Tools

Agile Hardware Project (AHA)

Digital Systems

We must make hardware/software systems easier and more fun to develop, which means that we need to enable a more “agile” hardware development flow, making it possible to quickly and easily modify an existing design and play with the resulting system. 

Agile Hardware Project (AHA)

Open Source PHY

Mixed Signal

We aim to overcome the challenges in open-source adoption presented by silicon design and create an open source PHY (high-speed link) in order to demonstrate that open-source mixed signal IC designs are possible.

Open Source PHY

Analog Emulation

Mixed Signal

Developing strategies to model analog blocks within the context of FPGA emulation, along with an open-source framework that makes it easy to apply those strategies.

 

Analog Emulation

DaVE

Mixed Signal

DaVE is a family of tools that form a "big Digital, little analog" Verification Environment, designed to help simulate circuits that contain significant digital logic interacting with small analog blocks.

DaVE

Fly Neuroscience

Applications to Biology

Studying how fruit flies transform visual stimuli into physical action. Rather than using the traditional "fly-on-a-ball" setup, which confines flies to a fixed position, developing a new platform, called FlyVR, that allows flies to walk freely during experiments.

Fly Neuroscience

Genomics: SegAlign

Applications to Biology

Exploring various genomic analysis pipelines through hardware-software-algorithm co-design.
SegAlign is a scalable, GPU-based system for computing pairwise Whole Genome Alignment (WGA).
 

Genomics: SegAlign

Debugging

Education

Studying how students learn to debug circuits in order to improve electrical engineering education. Debugging is a complex cognitive process and is a specialized form of problem-solving that engineers and computer scientists use on a daily basis when working with physical systems and code.

Debugging