Schutt-Aine recognized for outstanding sustained technical contribution by IEEE Electronics Packaging Society

Professor of electrical and computer engineering Jose E Schutt-Aine has worked in electronics packaging for over 30 years. This year, his dedication was rewarded with an Outstanding Sustained Technical Contribution Award from the IEEE Electronics Packaging Society, recognizing “outstanding, important, and sustained technical contributions to and leadership in electronic packaging.”

From computers to smartphones, our everyday electronics all need a form of packaging. Electronics packaging is about how you put systems together: combining chips, transistors, package and circuit board to build hardware. Packaging is an integral part of modern technology, and the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act has a strong component on packaging overseen by the National Advanced Packaging Manufacturing Program.

Awardees need to have made sustained contributions to electronics packaging over at least 15 years. Schutt-Ainé fulfills this requirement with ease – his research in this field started when he came to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1983 as a graduate student.

Schutt-Ainé’s research group in The Grainger College of Engineering has made landmark contributions to simulations for packaging. Most recently, his team developed the latency insertion method, perhaps the fastest method for simulating circuits. For hardware with thousands or even millions of components, these simulations can take days to run. The latency insertion method can massively reduce simulation times, and they are looking at developing this further for commercial use.

While technology has changed a lot over the past 40 years, Schutt-Ainé has consistently focused on one aspect of packaging: signal integrity. This was a new problem when he began this research as a graduate student, but it has grown more important as packaging becomes increasingly complex.

As chips and other components become increasingly small and intricate, innovative space-saving solutions are needed to make the packaging that combines this hardware into a usable whole. Currently, a system known as heterogeneous integration is used to combine smaller chips, using new architectures with finer interconnections at the package level. “While all of that is taking place, what happens to the signal?” Schutt-Ainé asks.

He is also working on redesigning the architecture in computer systems to minimize the huge power consumption of artificial intelligence and lower its carbon footprint. Schutt-Ainé comments: “The amount of power that it takes to train these AI systems is huge, and it’s been estimated that 80% of the power consumption comes from data movement. Packaging is looking at new ways to re-architecture the computing systems so that the data movement is minimized.”

When asked what has changed the most in electronics packaging over the years, Schutt-Ainé names artificial intelligence, and, more broadly, how computer technology has transformed our lives.

“I thought that being an electrical engineer meant that I would be in the lab working with wires. But today, most of what I do is software. I still consider myself a hardware person, but I discovered the importance of software – it essentially means information.” He is a fan of the CS + X blended degree option at the University of Illinois that enables students to study software alongside another area of expertise.

Looking to the future, Schutt-Ainé says, “This is a very exciting time to be doing packaging. But to design these computing systems, collaboration is key. If you isolate yourself, it’s not going to work. You need those different disciplines to be talking to each other. That’s going to be key for the future of advanced packaging.”