ECE Alum Brandon Noia Wins Prestigious Dissertation Award

Brandon Noia, who earned his PhD from Duke ECE in 2014 under the advisement of Krishnendu Chakrabarty, the William H. Younger Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Duke, has been selected to receive the 2014 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the European Design and Automation Association (EDAA).

Noia received the award, in the area of New Directions in Circuit and System Test, for his dissertation "Design-for-Test and Test Optimization Techniques for TSV-based 3D Stacked ICs."

This award, one of the most prestigious PhD dissertation awards in the field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA), recognizes the importance of university research to the advancement of design automation and test and encourages young researchers to work in the field. The award includes a monetary prize and an offer to publish the dissertation in the Springer EDAA Outstanding Monographs series. It was presented at the DATE 2015 conference in Grenoble, France.

Noia's dissertation is among the first worldwide on test solutions for 3D stacked ICs, a leading technology contender for the next generation of high-performance and low-footprint integrated circuits (ICs). Breakthroughs like Noia’s in test technology will help address the obstacles hindering mainstream adoption of 3D integration, allowing higher levels of silicon integration, fewer defect escapes, and ultimately commercial exploitation.

The impact of Noia’s research on probing is evident from the investment made by The Semiconductor Research Corporation, a consortium of major semiconductor companies (including Intel, IBM, and Texas Instruments, among others), in sponsoring Noia’s dissertation and filing three issued US patents resulting from his research. Noia’s PhD dissertation led to six journal articles, four of which were published in the IEEE Transactions. He has also published 10 conference papers at highly selective venues such as ITC (three times), VTS, and ETS. Springer has published his PhD thesis as a book in expanded form.

Noia currently works at AMD in Boxborough, Mass., as a senior design engineer.

Duke ECE congratulates Brandon Noia on this prestigious award, and commends him on his extremely high productivity and stellar publication record.

Read more about EDAA and this award