Mark Horowitz's Link to Chip-to-Chip Communication: His Significant and Fundamental Contributions

Prof. Mark Horowitz has been focusing on how to enhance the performance of integrated circuits (ICs) and digital systems for over 30 years. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was among the pioneers who recognized the impact of technology scaling on a single-chip microprocessor and focused his research on architectural techniques, which was previously only possible on large expensive mainframes. His work on projects such as Mips-X [3], Torch, Dash [11], and flash [10] led to advancements in many areas including compilers, computer-aided design development, memories, high-speed logic, clocking, and mixed-signal design [12]. One such area of research is high-speed integrated input–output (I/O) interfaces and serialization/deserialization (SerDes).