Trevor Mudge

Proposer of Razor, a circuit technique that allows robust operation at very low voltages in processor pipelines based on dynamic detection and correction of circuit timing errors, Mudge has been a University of Michigan, Ann Arbor research professor since 1977 and was named the first Bredt Family Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science after concluding a ten-year term as the Director of the Advanced Computer Architecture Laboratory. He has been recognized by the University of Illinois Computer Science Department as an "outstanding educator and researcher whose work has advanced the field of low-power computer architecture and its interaction with technology." In 2014 he received the Distinguished Achievement award from the CS @ ILLINOIS 50th Anniversary Celebration.

His research interests include computer architecture, computer-aided design, and compilers leading to new technologies that reduced energy consumption of microprocessors while maintaining acceptable performance in an era of exponential growth in embedded processors and system-on-chip designs. His contributions have greatly influenced both the research literature and the actual products made possible by his research. With his team from the University of Michigan, he proposed Razor, a circuit technique that allows robust operation at very low voltages in processor pipelines based on dynamic detection and correction of circuit timing errors.

Mudge has also explored near-threshold computing, a design space where the supply voltage is approximately equal to the threshold voltage of the transistors in a microprocessor. The approach is applicable to a broad range of power-constrained computing segments from sensors to higher-performance servers.

He graduated with a B.S. degree in Cybernetics from the University of Reading, England, and earned his M.S. degree and Ph.D. in Computer Science both from the University of Illinois, Urbana in 1977. Mudge is the author of numerous papers on computer architecture, programming languages, VLSI design, and computer vision, and has chaired about 30 theses in these research areas.

A Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the ACM, the IEE—from which he received the ACM–IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award in 2014 "for contributions to low-power computer architecture for high-performance microprocessors"—Mudge is also a Fellow of the British Computer Society. In addition to his position as a University of Michigan faculty member, he has run Idiot Savants, a chip design consultancy, and has served as technical advisor to several venture firms.