The Journey Towards the Creation of HDMI: How a serial interface used in a UC Berkeley SPUR project in the 1980’s became a household brand

I first met Prof. Deog-Kyoon (D.-K.) Jeong during the graduate school of electrical engineering and computer science [EECS at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley)] in 1984. We worked closely together for five years during our graduate studies on a project called Symbolic Processing Using RISCs (SPUR), which was led by Prof. David Patterson (
Figure 1
). Under the same Ph.D. thesis advisor, Prof. David A. Hodges, Prof. Jeong worked on developing the VLSI cache and memory management chip, while I worked on a CPU chip. Prof. Jeong’s key contributions encompassed not only managing all aspects of the VLSI chip design but also applying the innovative charge-pump phase-locked loop for the synchronization of multichip (CPU, FPU, and CCMU) operations. The SPUR system first employed what became an industry standard practice in virtually all VLSI system IC designs since then.