TTTC’s E. J. McCluskey Best Doctoral Thesis 2020 VT Semifinals winner.

Named after Prof. E.J. McCluskey, a key contributor to the field of test technology, the 2020 TTTC’s Doctoral Thesis Award serves the purpose to promote most impactful doctoral student work, to provide the students with the exposure to the community and the prospective employers, and to support interaction between academia and industry in the field of test technology.

TTTC’s E.J. McCluskey Best Doctoral Thesis Award will be given to the winning student of the doctoral student contest and his or her advisor.

The contest is held in two stages: semi-finals and finals.

In 2020, semi-finals are held at the IEEE VLSI Test Symposium (VTS), the IEEE European Test Symposium (ETS), the IEEE Latin American Test Symposium (LATS) and the IEEE Asian Test Symposium (ATS). At each semi-final, a jury composed of industrial experts will determine the winner, and the four winners will compete against each other in the finals, held at the International Test Conference (ITC) 2020.

This year seven high-quality students joined the competition at VTS:

  • Assuring Security and Reliability of Emerging Non-Volatile Memories
    Mohammad Nasim Imtiaz Khan (The Pennsylvania State University)
  • Learning Enhanced Diagnosis of Logic Circuit Failures
    Soumya Mittal (Carnegie Mellon University)
  • Scalable Functional Validation of Next Generation SoCs
    Debjit Pal (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
  • Machine Learning-Based Hotspot Detection: Fallacies, Pitfalls and Marching Orders
    Gaurav Rajavendra Reddy (The University of Texas at Dallas)
  • Secure and Trustworthy Biochip Cyberphysical Systems
    Mohammed Shayan (New York University)
  • On-Die Learning: A Pathway to Post-Deployment Robustness and Trustworthiness of Analog/RF ICs
    Georgios Volanis (The University of Texas at Dallas)
  • Energy Efficient and Reliable Deep Learning Accelerator Design
    Jeff (Jun) Zhang (New York University)

After watching the student’s presentations and “virtually” meeting with them to ask questions the jury composed of:

Vivek Chickermane (Cadence)
Adit Singh (Auburn University)
Sohrab Aftabjahani (Intel Corp.)

has decreed that the top three students are:

  1. Mohammad Nasim Imtiaz Khan, Penn. State Univ.
  2. Georgios Volanis, Univ. Texas at Dallas
  3. Gaurav Rajavendra Reddy, Univ. Texas at Dallas

Congratulations to Mohammad Nasim for winning the competition and thanks to all students and to the juries for the participation to the contest. Thanks to the effort you significantly contributed to make this virtual edition of VTS more attractive for the audience.

Finally, we would like to thank

Prof. Naghmeh Karimi (UMBC)

 for organizing and coordinating the contest.

Without her dedication and support, all this would not have been possible.

Stefano Di Carlo and Peilin Song
VTS 2020 Program Co-Chairs