Trevor Mudge Recognized for Distinguished Achievement at UIUC 50th Anniversary Event

Bredt Family Professor of Engineering Trevor Mudge has been recognized by the University of Illinois Computer Science Department as an “outstanding educator and researcher whose work has advanced the field of low-power computer architecture and its interaction with technology.” He received a Distinguished Achievement Award at the Department’s CS @ Illinois 50th Anniversary Celebration.

Prof. Mudge, who is the Director of the ARM Research Center at Michigan, recognized early that power consumption would become a first-class constraint for computing systems. His inventive approaches have led to new technologies that reduce the energy consumption of microprocessors while maintaining acceptable performance in an era of exponential growth in embedded processors and system-on-chip designs. His contributions have greatly influenced both the research literature and the actual products made possible by his research.

Prof. Mudge’s current research includes investigations into  3D processor architectures, in which a number of processor cores are interconnected on and between a number of layers of silicon, parallel systems that increase the sharing of operations amongst those cores, and near threshold computing (NTC) systems that operate at a low voltage level that is essentially the threshold of error, and which are designed to compensate for inevitable low voltage errors.

According to Prof. Mudge, applications that will benefit from the development of these systems will be “computationally demanding and will often require compact or mobile form factors. Examples include intelligent, real-time search and rescue or reconnaissance systems; new forms of medical devices, such as a low-cost, handheld ultrasound system; processors to power more energy-efficient servers and data centers; and processors for automobiles that will control integrated advanced crash avoidance, navigation, multimedia, and safety systems.”

Prof. Mudge received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1977 and joined the faculty at Michigan that year. He is a recipient of the College of Engineering’s Ted Kennedy Family Team Excellence Award and its Research Excellence and Education Excellence Awards. He has held the Bredt Family Chair of Engineering since 2003. He was honored with the ACM/IEE Eckert-Mauchly Award, which is widely viewed as the computer architecture community’s most prestigious recognition, in 2014. He is a Fellow of IEEE.