By the end of years 70s, microprocessors were designed by hand showing excellent layout compaction. It will be shown some highlights of the reverse engineering of the Z8000, which control part was designed by hand, showing several layout optimization strategies. The observation of the Z8000 layout inspired the research of methods to do the automatic generation of the layout of any transistor network, allowing to reduce the number of transistors to implement a circuit, and by consequence, the leakage power. Some of the layout automation tools developed by our group are briefly presented.

Biography

Ricardo Reis received a Bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering from Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1978, and a Ph.D. degree in Microelectronics from the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble (INPG), France, in 1983. Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Montpellier in 2016. He is a full professor at the Informatics Institute of Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. His main research includes physical design automation, design methodologies, fault tolerant systems and microelectronics education. He has more than 750 publications including books, journals and conference proceedings. He was vice-president of IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) and he was also president of the Brazilian Computer Society (two terms) and vice-president of the Brazilian Microelectronics Society. He is an active member of CASS and he received the 2015 IEEE CASS Meritorious Service Award. He was vice-president of CASS for two terms (2008/2011). He is the founder of the Rio Grande do Sul CAS Chapter, which got the World CASS Chapter of The Year Award 2011, 2012, 2018 and 2022, and R9 Chapter of The Year 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017 and 2020. He is a founder of several conferences like SBCCI and LASCAS, the CASS Flagship Conference in Region 9. He was the General or Program Chair of several conferences like IEEE ISVLSI, SBCCI, IFIP VLSI-SoC, ICECS, PATMOS. Ricardo was the Chair of the IFIP/IEEE VLSI-SoC Steering Committee, vice-chair of the IFIP WG10.5 and he is Chair of IFIP TC10. He received the Researcher of the Year Award in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. He is a founding member of the SBC (Brazilian Computer Society) and also founding member of SBMicro(Brazilian Microelectronics Society). He was member of CASS DLP Program (2014/2015), and he has done more than 70 invited talks in conferences. He is the CASS representative at the IEEE IoT Technical Committee. Ricardo received the IFIP Fellow Award in 2021 and the ACM/ISPD Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022. He received the 2023 IEEE CASS John ChomaEducational Award and the 2024 Best Associate Editor of IEEE CASS Magazine. He is also Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE CEDA (2024-2025) and Distinguished Lecturer IEEE CASS (2014-2015, 2025-2026).