ECE 507 Seminar (Winter 2015)
2.00–3.15pm Friday, February 27th, Room EB-103
Convergence of Silicon, Sensors, Mobility, and
Cloud as Driving Forces in System Design
Innovation.
Serge Leef
Mentor Graphics Corporation, Wilsonville OR
Abstract
Concurrent emergence of several technologies set the stage for a very
dynamic landscape of opportunities in System Design. Advances in silicon
technology enabled increasingly more compact and power-efficient, internet
connected mobile devices. These communication and computing devices have
spread out through most of the population of the planet, giving nearly everyone
direct or indirect access to variety of local and remote applications. In turn, server
farms formed a worldwide resource with infinite storage and compute capacity.
Collectively referred to as Cloud these farms can host huge, dynamically updated
data-bases containing everything from individual shopper profiles to medical
records. Additionally, wireless sensors are becoming increasingly common: these
devices collect real-time data and upload it to the Cloud, making it available for
interpretation and processing.
When the wireless sensors are considered in a particular application domain,
exciting possibilities become apparent. For example, in preventative health care
application space, wireless sensors can collect variety of live data streams (weight,
glucose level, pulse rate, blood pressure, cardiac activity, caloric burn and intake,
exercise) about the subject and aggregate these data on the Cloud along with
patient’s historical medical records and possibly the decoded Genome. Cloudbased software systems could then dynamically analyze incoming data in
conjunction with statically available data, assess patient state, transmit status data
to the patient’s mobile device and alert the Physician if the diagnostic
interpretation warrants medical intervention.
Biography
Serge Leef is the Vice President of New Ventures and General Manager of the
System-Level Engineering Division. He is responsible for identifying and
developing product opportunities for EDA in adjacent, systems-oriented markets.
In addition to early stage programs, Serge leads on-going businesses focused on
markets where system-level design plays a pivotal role: cyber-physical system
design, aerospace networking, systems engineering, design data management,
cloud-based electronic design, IoT infrastructure, and hardware cybersecurity.
Serge serves on the Electrical and Computer Engineering Strategic Advisory Board
at North Carolina State University. Additionally, he is a member of Oregon's
Engineering and Technology Industry Council (ETIC) which advises the state's
public university system on engineering, computer science and technology
programs.
Prior to joining Mentor Graphics in 1990, he was responsible for design
automation at Silicon Graphics, where his team created revolutionary high-speed
simulation tools to enable design of high speed 3D graphics chips that defined
state-of-the-art in visualization, imaging, gaming and special effects for a decade.
Before 1987, Leef managed a CAE/CAD organization at Microchip Inc. From
1982 to 1987 Serge worked at Intel Corp. developing functional and physical
design and verification tools for major 8- and 16-bit microcontroller and
microprocessor programs. Serge holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and MS in
Computer Science from Arizona State University.
All welcome