Rosenbaum: Melvin and Anne Louise Hassebrock Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Professorship: Melvin and Anne Louise Hassebrock Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Alumnus Melvin D. Hassebrock (BSEE ’63) and his wife, Anne Louise, observed that with the onset of computer and network technologies, it is easy for anyone to publish content regardless of its origin or accuracy. The Melvin and Anne Louise Hassebrock Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, established in memoriam of the couple, will preserve a keen awareness of the importance of reliable data collection, analysis, and reporting.

The purpose of the professorship is to prevent sincere errors from turning into fact due to rapid dissemination and repetition, a common fallacy in the information age. The Hassebrocks emphasized that the engineering curriculum and faculty must impart to students the tools and methodology necessary to accurately and confidently interpret both the data collected in the laboratory, as well as that interpreted through studying journal articles, textbooks, and other sources.

In their view, a high-quality engineering education requires rigorous controls over the formulation of hypotheses, experimental design, and data collection. In an era of excess data and misinformation, the Melvin and Anne Louise Hassebrock Professor is charged with championing the seamless integration of the subject into current instruction and curriculum. 

Faculty: Elyse Rosenbaum

Elyse Rosenbaum
Elyse Rosenbaum

Elyse Rosenbaum is an acknowledged leader in the field of electrostatic discharge (ESD) reliability, receiving the Industry Pioneer Recognition Award from the Electrostatic Discharge Association in 2016. Previously, she was made an IEEE Fellow for her “contributions to electrostatic discharge reliability of integrated circuits.” She is a very dedicated research advisor whose students have received 8 best paper or best student paper awards and are highly sought after by employers.

Prof. Rosenbaum is the director of the Center for Advanced Electronics through Machine Learning (CAEML), a three-university effort supported by the National Science Foundation through its Industry/University Cooperative Research Center program. Rosenbaum has led the CAEML project since its inception.

Prof. Rosenbaum’s research sits at the intersection of IC design and IC reliability. Her current research interests include component and system-level ESD reliability, ESD-robust high-speed I/O circuit design, compact modeling, mitigation strategies for ESD-induced soft failures, and machine-learning aided behavioral modeling of microelectronic components and systems. Rosenbaum has been a major proponent of using circuit simulation to verify the ESD robustness of an IC design prior to its manufacture, an approach that becomes increasingly necessary due to semiconductor technology scaling and evolution. Her group not only develops the models needed to support such simulations, but also the experimental setups used to acquire the measurement data for model fitting. Rosenbaum believes that models based on poor or incomplete measurement data lead to poor design decisions.

Her explorations have resulted in nearly 200 technical publications. Rosenbaum was an editor for IEEE Transactions on Device and Materials Reliability for a decade, and is currently an editor for IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices. She has been included on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students multiple times.

Rosenbaum received a bachelor’s of science degree with distinction from Cornell University in 1984, master’s degree from Stanford University in 1985, and PhD from the University of California - Berkeley in 1992. She is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award. She has given many invited talks, most recently as a keynote speaker at DesignCon 2017.