photo

Igor Markov

Professor of Electrical Engr. and Computer Science (CSE Division), IEEE Fellow

Member of the Michigan Inst. for Computational Discovery & Engineering

Frequently Asked Questions about our recent Nature article on limits to computation

See our projects in Hardware security (1, 2), Post-silicon validation (1, 2), Probabilistic Test of Nanocircuits,
VLSI Routing, Placement and Physical Synthesis (1, 2, 3), Quantum circuit synthesis (PDF, IEEE Trans. on CAD),
simulation and quantum software (PDF, IEEE Computer), High-performance Algorithms for the Graph Automorphism problem (1, 2, 3)

Address: The University of Michigan     Phones: o (734) 936-7829
Fax: dept (734) 763-4617, web (435) 417-5485
2260 Hayward St. -- CSE Email:
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2121 Office: 4749 BBB
Graduate students & visitors   Past graduate students, visitors & postdocs Undergraduate students (past & current)
  • Aditya Prasad (Amazon & Google) & Vivek Shende (UC Berkeley, MIT & Princeton)
  • Marius Eriksen and Hayward Chan (Google.com)
  • Aaron Ng and David Papa (joined U. of Michigan)
  • Matt Hardy (DoD), Stephen Hufnagel (Toyota Research), Kamran Kasheff
  • Kevin Wilson, Mandy Roach (IBM), Andrew Zumchak (Bloomberg)
  • Bill Stoffel, Brad Anderson, Jeremy Wagner-Kaiser
  • Tom Mikulski, Pascal Carole, Josh Rychlinski, Jing Shen Ng
  • Ben Montgomery, Abhishek Mahanti, Anthony Wong
  • Steve Santure, Maya Spivak
  • Pinjie Huang, Ryan Moore, Mi Zho
  • Yida Yao, Sean Zimmerman
  • Haoran Li, Qiyang Lu, Ben VanderSloot, Siyan Zhou
  • Yujie An, Spencer Kim, Xinyu Zhu, Joe Lee, Peter Xie
  • Daniel McLennan, Michael Wang, Andrew Yates, Tyler Friedman
Ph.D. dissertations
  • May 2004, Saurabh Adya: Unification of VLSI Placement and Floorplanning
  • November 2004, Arathi Ramani: Exploiting Structure in Linear and Non-Linear 0-1 Problems
  • November 2006, George Viamontes: Efficient Quantum Circuit Simulation (.pdf)
  • August 2007, Kai-hui Chang: Functional Error Diagnosis, Correction and Layout Repair of Digital Circuits (.pdf)
  • August 2008, Stephen Plaza: Simulation-Based Hierarchical Synthesis and Verification (.pdf)
  • September 2008, Smita Krishnaswamy: Design, Analysis and Test of Logic Circuits under Uncertainty (.pdf)
  • September 2009, Jarrod Roy: High-performance Placement and Routing at the Nanometer Scale (.pdf)
  • September 2010, David Papa: Broadening the Scope of Multi-objective Optimization in Physical Synthesis of Integrated Circuits (.pdf)
  • September 2011, Dong-Jin Lee: High-performance and Low-power Clock Network Synthesis in the Presence of Variation (.pdf)
  • September 2012, Myung-Chul Kim: Multiobjective Optimization for High-performance Nanoscale Integrated Circuits (.pdf)
  • November 2012, Jin Hu: High-performance Global Routing for Trillion-gate Systems-on-Chips (.pdf)
  • January 2014, Hector Garcia: Hybrid Techniques for Simulation of Quantum Circuits Using the Heisenberg Representation (.pdf)
Student awards and distinctions
  • June 2001, Arathi Ramani and Saurabh Adya: Design Automation Conf. (DAC) fellowship
  • September 2001, DoRon Motter: Motorola fellowship
  • November 2002, DoRon Motter: 1st place at ICCAD CADathlon 2002
  • June 2003, Vivek Shende and Aditya Prasad: IEEE CaS Donald O. Pederson paper-of-the-year award (IEEE Trans. on Computer-Aided Design)
  • August 2003, George Viamontes: Dept. of Energy High-performance Computing Fellowship
  • June 2004, Matt Hardy: 1st place at the student design contest at the Design Automation Conf. (DAC 2004)
  • September 2004, Saurabh Adya: graduate mentorship award from the University of Michigan
  • October 2004, Hayward Chan: honorable mention from the Computing Research Association (CRA) for work on block-packing with symmetries
  • November 2004, Gabe Black and Jarrod Roy: 1st place at ICCAD CADathlon 2004 (shared with MIT)
  • March 2005, Smita Krishnaswamy and George Viamontes: best paper award at the Design Automation and Test in Europe Conf. (DATE 2005)
  • November 2005, Jarrod Roy: 1st place at ICCAD CADathlon 2005
  • March 2006, Jarrod Roy: Rackham Graduate Fellowship
  • April 2006, Aaron Ng: Nominated for the best paper award at the Int'l Symp. on Physical Design (ISPD 2006)
  • June 2006, Kai-Hui Chang and David Papa: 1st place at the IWLS 2006 Implementation Challenge
  • September 2006, Jin Hu: Rackham Graduate Fellowship
  • November 2006, Kai-Hui Chang and George Viamontes: 2st place at ICCAD CADathlon 2006
  • March 2007, Jarrod Roy: winner of the ISPD 2007 routing contest (1st place in the 2D category, 3rd place in the 3D category)
  • March 2007, Michael Moffitt: winner of the ISPD 2007 routing contest (1st place in the 3D category, 2nd place in the 2D category)
  • April 2007, Michael Moffitt: winner of the IBM Joseph Raviv fellowship
  • May 2007, Smita Krishnaswamy and Steve Plaza: 2nd place at the IWLS 2007 Implementation Challenge
  • September 2007, Hector Garcia: Rackham Graduate Fellowship
  • January 2008, Kai-hui Chang: EDAA Outstanding Ph.D. dissertation award (presented at DATE 2008)
  • April 2008, Steve Plaza: best paper award at ISPD 2008
  • December 2008, Dongjin Lee: 2nd place at the eASIC circuit placement contest.
  • April 2009, Dongjin Lee: tied for 1st place at the ISPD 2009 clock-network synthesis contest organized by IBM Research
  • July 2009, Kai-hui Chang: ACM SIGDA Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award (presented at DAC 2009)
  • November 2009, Hector Garcia First Place in Technical Paper Competition at SHPE 2009
  • March 2010, Smita Krishnaswamy EDAA Outstanding Ph.D. dissertation award (presented at DATE 2010)
  • March 2010, Dongjin Lee and Myungchul Kim: 1st place at the ISPD 2010 clock-network synthesis contest organized by IBM Research and Intel Labs
  • November 2010, Dongjin Lee and Myungchul Kim: Best-paper award at ICCAD 2010 for the paper "SimPL: An Effective Placement Algorithm"
  • November 2010, Dongjin Lee and Myungchul Kim: 2nd place at ICCAD 2010 CADathlon
  • February 2011, David Papa: EDAA Outstanding Ph.D. dissertation award (presented at DATE 2011)
  • March 2011, Myung-Chul Kim and Jin Hu: 3rd place at the ISPD placement contest.
  • April 2011, Jin Hu: Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award
  • April 2012, Hector Garcia Rackham Centennial Fellowship
  • June 2012, Myung-Chul Kim and Jin Hu: 3rd place at the DAC placement contest.
  • November 2012, Myung-Chul Kim and Jin Hu: 1st place at the ICCAD place-and-route contest .
  • March 2013, Hector J. Garcia: UM College of Engineering Distinguished Leadership Award
  • March 2013, Pankit Thapar and Benjamin VanderSloot: 1st and 2nd places (in two categories) at the ISPD 2013 gate-sizing contest organized by Intel Labs
  • November 2013, Daniel McLennan, Peter Xie and Andrew Segavac: 3rd place at the ICCAD 2013 logic-synthesis contest organized by IBM Research and Cadence Design Systems
  • December 2013, Hector J. Garcia: induction into the Bouchet Graduate Honor Society

  Books and surveys CS/CE student might want to own, read in a bookstore, or find online
  • Thomas Kuhn, ``The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'', University Of Chicago Press, 3rd ed., 1996 (synopsis, outline and study guide)
  • W. Strunk, E. B. White, and R. Angell, ``Elements of Style'', Longman, 2000 (original 1918 edition)
  • Steve McConnell, ``Code Complete'', 2nd ed. Microsoft Press, 2004
  • Andreas Zeller, ``Why Programs Fail'', Morgan Kaufmann, 2005.
  • S. Dasgupta, C. H. Papadimitriou and U. V. Vazirani, ``Algorithms'', McGraw Hill, 2006
  • H. Kopka and Patrick W. Daly, ``Guide to LaTeX'' (4th Edition or later), Addison-Wesley Professional, 2003
  • Jon Bentley, `` Programming Pearls'', 2nd ed., Addison Wesley, 2000
  • T. H. Cormen, C. E. Leiserson, R. L. Rivest and C. Stein, ``Introduction to Algorithms'', 2nd ed., McGrawHill, 2001
  • Nicolai Josuttis, `` The C++ Standard Library'', Addison Wesley, 1999
  • Pete Becker, ``The C++ Standard Library Extensions: A Tutorial and Reference'', Addison Wesley/Pearson, 2006
  • R. Cottle, E. Johnson, R. Wets, `` George Danzig (1914-2005) and the History of Linear Programming'',
    Notices of Amer. Math. Soc., March 2007, vol. 54, no. 3.
    In the same issue: D. Gale, ``Linear Programming and the Simplex Method.
  • L. Lavagno, G. Martin, and L. Scheffer, eds; ``Electronic Design Automation for Integrated Circuits Handbook'',
    two-volume set, CRC Press, 2006
  • M. A. Nielsen and I. L. Chuang, ``Quantum Computation and Quantum Information'', Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000
 bookworm
  Advice for graduate students (try not to ignore more than 50%)

      Being a graduate student   Choosing an advisor   Reading recent papers   Choosing a research topic   Becoming a researcher   Following career advice
      Reasons to believe in P!=NP and in Quantum computing  
      Innovating   Following the rules   Learning scripting languages   Learning software development   Being precise   Not sleeping  
      Thinking like a language lawyer   Writing an abstract, a short story, a paper   Preparing slides   Giving a talk   Reviewing conference submissions
      Avoiding delays on the way to a Ph.D. degree   Writing a dissertation   Defending it  A Claiming a breakthrough  
      Understanding economy trends   Tracking trends in Washington   Determining job location   Applying for a job: (entry-level, with experience)  
      Interviewing   Climbing the academic ladder   Writing book reviews
            Joe Costello's DAC 2006 talk `` If you want to catch a fish, think like a fish'' (1hr video)

  More advice from UCSD

  Other reading         More links

      Alice and Bob profiles   Evolution of an Engineer   Sudoku solver in 3 lines and 2 lines   Online LaTeX Editor ShareLaTeX   Ball Semiconductor   Misc