Giovanni (Nanni) De Micheli, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University and recipient of this year’s IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award. His research interests include several aspects of design technologies for integrated circuits and systems, with particular emphasis on synthesis, system-level design, hardware/ software co-design and low-power design.

Kurt Keutzer, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley. Kurt has spent over a decade researching software support for the design of application-specific instruction processors (ASIPs) as well as championing the market trend away from ASICs and onto ASIPs.

Tobias Noll, chair of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Systems Department at Aachen University of Technology (RWTH Aachen). Dr. Noll has thirty years of progressive experience in VLSI architectures, circuits, and design methodologies with a focus on high-performance, low-power DSP applications and deep-submicron issues.

Masaru Kakimoto, general manager, Embedded Processor Division, Platform Technology Center, SONY Corporation. A pioneer in the establishment of SoC system-level design methodologies, Mr. Kakimoto is responsible for the development and proliferation of SONY’s HW/SW SoC platform design environment. His interests include top-down design, platform-based design and high-level synthesis technologies.

Yong-en Chen, professor and director of the Institute of Telecommunications and director of the Design Center of Communication Software and ASIC at Tongji University in Shanghai, China. His research interests include system-level design, hardware/software co-design and protocol stack design of communications SoC.

Pierre Paulin, director of SoC Platform Automation in the Central R&D organization of STMicroelectronics. Previously, he was director of Embedded Systems Technologies for ST in Grenoble, France. He also managed embedded software tools and high-level synthesis R&D with BNR, the Nortel Networks research labs.