Dr. Smita Krishnaswamy (CSE Ph.D. 2008) has been selected to receive the 2009 Outstanding Dissertation Award in the area of "New directions in circuit and system test" from the European Design and Automation Association (EDAA) for her dissertation, "Design, Analysis and Test of Logic Circuits under Uncertainty," which she defended at the University of Michigan. This award is among the most prestigious awards for Ph.D. dissertations in the field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA).

Her dissertation addresses the issue that due to technology scaling, logic circuits have become increasingly susceptible to probabilistic faults stemming from soft errors, manufacturing variability, and inherently probabilistic devices. Her Ph.D. research involved developing comprehensive and efficient algorithms for analyzing, designing, and testing circuits that are subject to such probabilistic behavior. Her main contributions include (i) an efficient and accurate reliability analyzer based on bit-parallel logic simulation signatures to guide circuit design, called AnSER (ii) several techniques for reliable logic design with low area and delay overhead, and (iii) an exact matrix-based analysis framework for post-silicon testing and algorithms based on probabilistic set-covering for test generation.

Dr. Krishnaswamy is currently a research scientist at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in the Logic Synthesis group. She is working on techniques for automated incremental chip design that are being utilized in new high-performance microprocessor designs. During the chip design process, design specifications can change after much of the implementation is already completed. Therefore, incremental synthesis techniques are needed in order to avoid laborious redesign or manual effort to incorporate such changes. She is also conducting research in physical synthesis and SAT-based logic synthesis.

Dr. Krishnaswamy's dissertation co-advisors were Professors John Hayes and Igor Markov.