David Blaauw

2022 Distinguished Academic Achievement Alumni Award

David Blaauw received his B.S. in Physics and Computer Science from Duke University in 1986, followed by his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1991.

Until August 2001, he worked for Motorola, Inc. in Austin, TX, where he was the manager of the High Performance Design Technology group and won the Motorola Innovation award. Since August 2001, he has been on the faculty of the University of Michigan, where he is the Kensall D. Wise Collegiate Professor of EECS. He has published over 600 papers, has received numerous best paper awards and holds 65 patents. He has researched ultra-low-power wireless sensors using subthreshold operation and low-power analog circuit techniques for millimeter systems. This research was awarded the MIT Technology Review's "one of the year’s most significant innovations." His research group introduced so-called near-threshold computing, which has become a common concept in semiconductor design. Most recently, he has pursued research in cognitive computing using analog, in-memory neural-networks for edge-devices and genomics for precision health. He was general chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Low Power and a member of the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) analog program subcommittee. He is an IEEE Fellow and received the 2016 SIA-SRC faculty award for lifetime research contributions to the U.S. semiconductor industry.  He is the director of the Michigan Integrated Circuits Lab.