Rob A. Rutenbar

Rob A. Rutenbar (born November 19, 1957) is an American academic noted for contributions to software tools that automate custom integrated circuit design, and custom hardware platforms for high-performance automatic speech recognition. He is Abel Bliss Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Rutenbar received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1979 and 1984, respectively. He joined the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 1984. At CMU, his research group developed a wide range of novel CAD tools to optimize, synthesize, and perform geometric layout on analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits. In 1998, he cofounded Neolinear, Inc. to commercialize these tools. He served as Neolinear’s Chief Scientist until its acquisition by Cadence Design Systems in 2004. In 2001, he was the founding director of a large, multi-university research center – the Center for Circuit & Systems Solutions (C2S2) -- funded by the US semiconductor industry and US Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) to address challenges arising from the end of Moore’s Law scaling. He served as Director of C2S2 from 2001 to 2009. Also while at CMU, his In Silico Vox project developed novel hardware platforms for very fast, energy efficient speech recognition. In 2006, he cofounded the Silicon Vox Corporation to commercialize these ideas. The company was renamed Voci Technologies in 2010, and it focuses on high-speed solutions for large-scale speech analytics. In 2010, he left CMU to become Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At Illinois, and continuing at CMU, he led some of the first work to apply data mining and machine learning techniques for electronic design automation. In 2013, he taught a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on VLSI CAD, to over 17,000 registered participants.

Rutenbar is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM. He received the 2001 Aristotle Award from the Semiconductor Research Corporation, acknowledging his mentoring and the impact of his students on the US semiconductor industry. He was awarded the Stephen J. Jatras (E’47) Chair in ECE by Carnegie Mellon University in 2001. He was honored with the University of Michigan Alumni Merit Award (Electrical Engineering) in 2002. He was awarded the IEEE CAS Industrial Pioneer Award in 2007, for “pioneering contributions” to tools for custom circuit synthesis, and their successful commercialization. In 2008, he was inducted into the College of Engineering's Alumni Hall of Fame at Wayne State University. He was awarded the Abel Bliss Professorship in Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2010. He is a two-time winner of the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design Donald O. Pedersen Best Paper Award, in 2011 and again in 2013, for work on statistical analysis for nanoscale silicon.