Expertise

Topics:  Integrated Circuits, Power Systems, Secure Hardware, Energy Grid Security

Industries: Education/Learning, Electrical Engineering

Lawrence Pileggi is the Coraluppi Head and Tanoto Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and has previously held positions at Westinghouse Research and Development and the University of Texas at Austin. Pileggi and fellow CMU researchers Lujo Bau and Vyas Sekar are calling on the research and policy communities to develop more comprehensive and accurate grid evaluation frameworks and datasets, and for updating threat models and grid resiliency requirements to match cyber attackers realistic capabilities.

He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989. He has consulted for various semiconductor and EDA companies, and was co-founder of Fabbrix Inc., Extreme DA, and Pearl Street Technologies. His research interests include various aspects of digital and analog integrated circuit design, and simulation, optimization and modeling of electric power systems.

He has received various awards, including Westinghouse corporation’s highest engineering achievement award, a Presidential Young Inves­tigator award from the National Science Foundation, Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Technical Excellence Awards in 1991 and 1999, the FCRP inaugural Richard A. Newton GSRC Industrial Impact Award, the SRC Aristotle award in 2008, the 2010 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Mac Van Valkenburg Award, the ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation in 2011, the Carnegie Institute of Technology B.R. Teare Teaching Award for 2013, and the 2015 Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) University Researcher Award. He is a co-author of "Electronic Circuit and System Simulation Methods," McGraw-Hill, 1995 and "IC Interconnect Analysis," Kluwer, 2002. He has published almost 400 conference and journal papers and holds 40 U.S. patents. He is a fellow of IEEE.

Media Experience

Power Shift: How CMU Is Leading America’s Energy Evolution  — CMU News
From reimagining AI data centers to modernizing and securing the electric grid, CMU researchers are working on practical solutions to pressing challenges in how the U.S. produces, moves and secures energy. Lujo Bauer, Larry Pileggi and Vyas Sekar are calling on the research and policy communities to develop more comprehensive and accurate grid evaluation frameworks and datasets, and for updating threat models and grid resiliency requirements to match cyber attackers realistic capabilities.

Useless High-Voltage Power Lines Risk Sparking California Fires  — Bloomberg
A high-voltage transmission line can transfer electricity to a nearby idled line through a process called electromagnetic induction. The magnetic field generated by a current on the energized line creates a current on other, nearby lines, said Larry Pileggi, a professor of electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. A surge of current could increase the size of the magnetic field, Pileggi said.

AI meets opera: A new blended class at CMU yields insights on music and flow  — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The partnership was a natural fit for a multidisciplinary campus, said Larry Pileggi, who leads CMU’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Latency, Interconnects, And Poker  — Semiconductor Engineering
Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Larry Pileggi, Coraluppi Head and Tanoto Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and the winner of this year’s Phil Kaufman Award for Pioneering Contributions. What follows are excerpts of that conversation.

To Become a World-Class Chipmaker, the United States Might Need Help  — The New York Times
Immigrants helped build Silicon Valley. Andy Grove, for example, escaped from Hungary in 1956 and went on to become the third employee of Intel, building it into a global chipmaking powerhouse. The United States still excels at designing chips but has lost the lead in making them. “Our U.S. work force is of insufficient size, but also, large populations of our technical work force are focused on learning A.I. and software development, which makes immigration of semiconductor technologists even more imperative,” Larry Pileggi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote in an email.

Preparing the Chip Workforce of the Future  — Carnegie Mellon University
"The ECE has shown industry partners the trends that are occurring at all major universities regarding the decline in students who choose hardware design as their specialty — and specifically, the trends for students who specialize in integrated circuit design," said Larry Pileggi, department head of ECE.