Dr. Frank Lee's lecture

On the morning of October 21, 2005, at the invitation of the College of Electrical Engineering, Dr. Frank Lee , the vice president of Synopsys Corporation, came to visit our college and delivered a lecture entitled Design Closure at 65nm Technology Node and Beyond. The lecture introduced three major challenges coming with the 90 nm / 65 nm technologies in VLSI circuit design and discussed the origins of these problems and the solutions. The lecture received a lot of praise among teachers and students present.

From 1990 to 1994, he worked for Cadence Design Systems in the physical design verification group which developed the industrial standard physical verification tools Dracula and Diva. During this period, he introduced asymptotic waveform evaluation (AWE) based RC network reduction in Dracula RC extraction and proposed Detailed Standard Parasitic Format/Reduced Standard Parasitic Format (DSPF/RSPF) which evolved into IEEE Standard Parasitic Exchange Format (SPEF) standard later on.

He then joined Avant! Corporation in 1995. While at Avant!, he developed the first cell based rail analysis and crosstalk analysis tools Mars-Rail and Mars-Xtalk in the place and route tools Aquarius and Apollo in 1997 which became the base for Astro-Rail and Astro-Xtalk in Astro product in 1999. He also introduced TLU capacitance model with 2.5D RC extraction in 1998, and congestion based capacitance estimation in 1999 for Apollo/Astro.  This technology brought sign off RC accuracy into Apollo/Astro implementation tools.  From 2000 to 2002, he led the timing analysis and optimization (TAO) team to develop and productize the physical synthesis tool Saturn.

After the merge with Synopsys, he became the Sr. Director and then VP of Engineering of the place and route team that is responsible for the research and development of the Astro product, one of the most popular physical implementation tools in the industry. Astro is a modern physical implementation product who includes placement, routing, clock tree synthesis, physical synthesis, and noise analysis and repair.