Bio:

Kahng is a Professor in UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering's Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering departments. He heads up UCSD VLSI CAD Laboratory, is on the executive committee and thrust leader in the MARCO Design and Test focus center, and is program chair for the 2004 Design Automation Conference, the semiconductor industry's flagship annual conference. Kahng came to UCSD in January 2001, from the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UCSD in 1989.

Ever since the integrated circuit or IC was invented, transistor counts and clock speeds on microprocessors, memory, and other chips have doubled roughly every two years. Kahng is a leader in multiple efforts to maintain this pace, dubbed Moore's Law. One focus is helping to specify the next-generation computer-aided design (CAD) tools that take into account physical design aspects once left for the foundry. Problems with physical implementations of logic have been driving up costs as IC designs have grown more complex. Kahng can speak extensively about this topic and the state of the art in software for IC placement and routing, power leakage, interconnect analysis and optimization, and other physical phenomena. Kahng is a leader in 'roadmapping' efforts that help rationalize research spending. Since 2000, Kahng has been chair of the Design technology working group for the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. ITRS is sponsored by the major semiconductor consortia of North America, Europe, and the Far East, and also is backed by key manufacturers, suppliers, government organizations, and universities.