The Legacy of Mark Horowitz in Me: His Influence and Inspiration

One of the privileges of working with someone as great as Mark Horowitz is the influence and inspiration he brings. And that influence and inspiration will shape your life before you even realize it. I was a graduate student of Prof. Horowitz at Stanford University from 1997 until 2003. My Ph.D. dissertation was on circuit techniques to adaptively regulate the supply voltage of high-speed serial links and reduce power dissipation. Despite my background in IC design, I had only a brief career as a circuit designer after graduation and now have spent much longer time developing design tools and flows for analog circuits. One example is XMODEL, an event-driven analog/mixed-signal simulator in SystemVerilog. With its ideas so unique compared to other simulators, I thought I finally found something that I can claim as my own work, outside the shadow of my Ph.D. advisor. I recently realized that I was greatly mistaken. The key ideas behind XMODEL can trace their roots to Prof. Horowitz's early works dated almost 33 years ago.