I graduated in June, 2010 with a Master of Applied Science degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto. During my studies here, I was affiliated to the Computer Engineering Research Group and was appointed as a Reseach and Teaching Assistant. I worked with Prof. Farid Najm in the area of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) for Electronic Design Automation (EDA). Particularly, my work focussed on On-chip Power Supply Network Verification.

Previously, I have earned my Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology(IIT) Roorkee in 2008. During Spring 2007, I visited National University of Singapore(NUS) as an international exchange student.

Since graduation, I am working at Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE:AMD), Inc. as a Design Engineer in Physical Design Department at their Markham office.

Research

While verifying an IC design, it is crucial to ensure that the voltage drop on a power grid remain within limits. Any fluctuations in the grid voltage may lead to increased circuit delay or soft errors. One way ensure grid safety is simulate it with some known input traces. However, this technique does not guarantee a conservative estimate as an exhaustive analysis with all possible vector traces in infeasible. Futhermore, the detailed information about the current loadings in not available in early stages of design flow and hence, a vector-based approach is not suitable.

These days, with the reduced supply voltage levels and increased logic density, the problem of ensuring power grid integrity has become more severe. The situation is further complicated by the shear size of modern power grids containing billions of nodes, which render present state-of-art techniques useless. My work aimed at developing an efficient early vectorless power grid verification technique.

Teaching

Spring 2009
ECE 451 - VLSI Systems and Design

Fall 2010
ECE 253- Digital and Computer Systems

Spring 2010
ECE 243 - Computer Organization
ECE 451 - VLSI Systems and Design

Courses

Fall 2008
ECE1777 - Computer Methods for Circuit Simulation
ECE534 - Integrated Circuit Engineering
ECE557 - Systems Control

Spring 2009
ECE 1387 - CAD for Digital Circuit Synthesis and Layout
ECE 1769 - Behavioral Synthesis of Digital Integrated Circuits

GPA: 4/4

Personal

I was born in a small town of Nangal in Punjab province of India. The place is located on the banks of river Sutlej and boasts of locating highest dam in India. I did my kindergarten here after which we moved to district of Sirsa, from where I did all my schooling. My elder sister is a computer engineer working in IT industry and father is an Executive Engineer with the state government.

The next stop was Roorkee, a small town in foothills of Himalayas, where I did my graduation. Those four years were full of fun and activity. Surprise quizzes in 8'0 clock lecture, midnight birthday celebrations, long chat sessions, night outs, late night canteen visits are few memories to cherish. Also got a chance to visit two beautiful countries in South East Asia(Singapore and Malaysia).

Grad school is a different game. Unlike undergrad, you don't have to run madly after grades as there aren't any exams. Instead, you have course projects which never seem to finish. However, the kind of atmoshere (flexible, relaxed) and the people around you is something that is unique to academia. I was fortunate enough to get in Prof. Najm's group and work with interesting people on an even more interesting problem, which kept me curious and motivated. Grad school allows one to do whatever the person likes to do most, which according to me is best case scenario. I'll strongly encourage everyone to go and experience it.