SOE Distinguished Chair Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

Chancellor Emeritus, UC Merced, CA, USA

The Early Days of CMOS VLSI Design and CAD; Back to the Future

About the Speaker:

Sung-Mo "Steve" Kang received his B.S. (Summa Cum Laude) degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck, NJ in 1970, M.S. degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1972, and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1975, all in electrical engineering. From March 2007 to June 2011, he has served as Chancellor and Professor of Engineering at UC Merced. He has also served on the California Council of Science and Technology, UC President's Science and Technology Board, Central Valley Higher Education Consortium Board, MentorNet Advisory Board, and as Chairman of the Board of the Great Valley Center.

From Jan. 2001 to Feb. 2007, he was Dean of Baskin School of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of California at Santa Cruz. From July 2002 to June 2003, he served as President of Silicon Valley Engineering Council (www.svec.org). From 2002 to 2004, he was a Chaired Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).

From August 1995 to December 2000, he was Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. From August 1985 to December 2000, he was Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Research Professor of Coordinated Science Laboratory and Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was named the first Charles Marshall Senior University Scholar, an Associate in the Center for Advanced Study, and has served as the Founding Director of Center for ASIC Research and Development, and Associate Director of NSF Engineering Research Center for Compound Semiconductor Microelectronic at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a Visiting Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne in 1989, at the University of Karlsruhe in 1997 and at the Technical University of Munich in 1998.

Until 1985 he was with AT&T Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill and Holmdel, and also served as a faculty member of Rutgers University. He led the development of world's first full 32-bit CMOS microprocessor chips and their peripheral chips as supervisor of high-end microprocessor design group. These chips were manufactured for AT&T's high-end switching machines such as 3B5 and 3B20 and also AT&T computers. For his outstanding leadership in both development and later manufacturing of these chips, he was awarded an exceptional contribution award. In early phase of his Bell Labs career, he designed satellite-based private networks using statistical traffic analysis and nonlinear optimization.

His current research interests include memristors, memristive devices and systems, low power VLSI design; optimization for performance, reliability and manufacturability; mixed-signal mixed-technology integrated system; modeling and simulation of semiconductor devices and circuits; high-speed optoelectronic circuits, fully optical network systems, and nanobioelectronics.