Mark Alan Horowitz is an American electrical engineer, computer scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur. He is the Yahoo! Founders Professor in the School of Engineering and the Fortinet Founders Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He teaches in both the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments and was the head of the Electrical Engineering department from 2008 to 2012. He helped start Rambus Inc. and previously held the roles of chairman and chief scientist there. Horowitz has written more than 700 papers for conferences and research. He is one of the most often cited computer architects in history. He has many inventions and holds 374 patents as of 2023.

Education

Horowitz earned a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978. After finishing school, he moved to Silicon Valley to work at Signetics, a company that helped create early integrated circuits. After one year of work, he went to Stanford University, where he developed computer tools for designing very-large-scale integration (VLSI) circuits. His research at Stanford included some of the first studies on measuring the resistance of wires in integrated circuits and calculating the time delays in MOS transistor circuits. At Stanford, he studied under Robert Dutton and completed a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1984.

Academic career

In 1984, Horowitz joined the Stanford faculty. At Stanford, his research focused on VLSI circuits, and he led early RISC processor designs, including MIPS-X. His research covered electrical engineering, computer science, and applying engineering tools to biology. He worked on RISC processors, multiprocessor designs, low-power circuits, high-speed links, computational photography, and genomics. Horowitz and his research group at Stanford started many innovations in high-speed link design, and many of today’s high-speed link designs are created by his former students or colleagues from Rambus.

In the 2000s, he worked with Marc Levoy on computational photography, a research area that explored using computation to create better images, often by combining data from multiple sensors. This research also studied light-field photography, which captured enough information to allow computers to reconstruct views from any angle. The need to capture light-fields led to the creation of the Stanford Camera Array, a system that synchronized and collected images from 100 sensors. This work later contributed to the development of the Lytro camera, which allowed photographs to be refocused after they were taken.

In 2006, Horowitz received the IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits for pioneering contributions to the design of high-performance digital integrated circuits and systems. In 2007, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his leadership in high-bandwidth memory-interface technology and scalable cache-coherent multiprocessor architectures. In 2008, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At the 2014 International Solid-State Circuits Conference, he presented his research on the outlook for the semiconductor industry in Computing's Energy Problem (And What We Can Do About It).

In 2018, Horowitz founded the AHA Agile Hardware Project at Stanford University and has led it since then. The program aims to enable a more agile hardware development process by creating an open-source hardware/software tool chain to quickly create and test alternative hardware designs and a new open-source system, ARM/CGRA SoC, to support rapid execution and emulation of these designs. The project is funded by Intel’s Science and Technology Center, DARPA, the National Science Foundation, Amazon Web Services, Meta Platforms Inc., Apple Inc., Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Google. He also helps lead Stanford’s Quantum Fundamentals, Architectures and Machines initiative (Q-FARM), which combines the expertise and facilities of Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to advance quantum information science.

Business

In 1990, Horowitz took a break from Stanford University to work with Mike Farmwald on a new memory technology design that could handle large amounts of data quickly. This work led to the creation of Rambus Inc., a company that focused on developing high-speed memory technology. After spending one year at Rambus, Horowitz returned to Stanford and began a research program on fast data transfer systems. Video game machines, such as the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation 2, were among the first widely produced products to use Rambus's memory chips. Later, Intel used Rambus's RDRAM technology for computer processors, and Rambus memory was included in personal computers during the late 1990s. In 2005, Horowitz briefly returned to Rambus to help start a research group at the company. He stopped being on the board of directors in 2011.

Awards and honors

• Received the IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits in 2006
• Member of the National Academy of Engineering (inducted in 2007)
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected in 2008)
• Received the SIA University Research Award in 2011
• Fellow of the IEEE
• Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery
• Received the Best Paper Award at ISQED in 2005
• Received the Jack Kilby Outstanding Paper Award at ISSCC in 2003
• Published the Most influential paper at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture in 1994
• Published the Most Influential Paper at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture in 1989
• Received the ChipEx Global Leadership Award in 2015
• Received the ACM – IEEE CS Eckert–Mauchly Award in 2022

Publications

• J. Acken, A. Agarwal, G. Gulak, M. Horowitz, S. McFarling, S. Richardson, A. Salz, R. Simoni, D. Stark, and S. Tjiang, The MIPS-X RISC Microprocessor. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, MA, 1989. Foreword by J.L. Hennessy.
• S. Bell, J. Pu, J. Hagerty, M. Horowitz, Compiling Algorithms for Heterogeneous Systems. Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2018.

• Multithreaded Computer Architectures, chapter 8 – "Architectural and Implementation Tradeoffs in the Design of Multiple-Context Processors", Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.
• Design of High-Performance Microprocessor Circuits, "High-Speed Electrical Signaling", 2001.
• Power Aware Design Methodologies, chapter 8 – "Energy-Efficient Design of High-Speed Links", Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.
• Computational Imaging and Vision, Chapter 7 – "Synthetic Aperture Focusing using Dense Camera Arrays", Volume 35, 2007, pp. 159–172.
• Methods in Enzymology, Chapter 13 – "Alignment of Cryo-Electron Tomography Datasets", Elsevier, 2010, pp. 343–367.

• Gary B. Bronner, Brent S. Haukness, Mark A. Horowitz, Mark D. Kellam, Fariborz Assaderaghi. "United States Patent 11,244,727: Dynamic memory rank configuration", Rambus Inc, Feb 8, 2022.
• Vladimir M Stojanovic, Andrew C Ho, Anthony Bessios, Bruno W Garlepp, Grace Tsang, Mark A Horowitz, Jared L Zerbe, Jason C Wei. "United States Patent 16/999,853: Partial response receiver", Rambus Inc, Mar 11, 2021.
• Craig Hampel, Mark Horowitz. "United States Patent 17/000,130: System including hierarchical memory modules having different types of integrated circuit memory devices", Rambus Inc, Feb 4, 2021.
• Mark Alan Horowitz, Ilias Pappas, Edward Buckley, William Thomas Blank. "United States Patent 10,861,380: Display systems with hybrid emitter circuits", Facebook Technologies LLC, Dec 8, 2020.
• Haw-Jyh Liaw, Xingchao Yuan, Mark A Horowitz. "United States Patent 10,782,344: Technique for determining performance characteristics of electronic devices and systems", Rambus Inc, Sep 22, 2020.
• Vladimir M Stojanovic, Andrew C Ho, Anthony Bessios, Fred F Chen, Elad Alon, Mark A Horowitz. "United States Patent 10,771,295: High speed signaling system with adaptive transmit pre-emphasis", Rambus Inc, Sep 8, 2020.
• Vladimir M Stojanovic, Andrew C Ho, Anthony Bessios, Bruno W Garlepp, Grace Tsang, Mark A Horowitz, Jared L Zerbe, Jason C Wei. "United States Patent 10,764,094: Partial response receiver", Rambus Inc, Sep 1, 2020.
• Craig Hampel, Mark Horowitz. "United States Patent 10,755,794: System including hierarchical memory modules having different types of integrated circuit memory devices", Rambus Inc, Aug 25, 2020.
• Ely K Tsern, Mark A Horowitz, Frederick A Ware. "United States Patent 16/805,619: Memory Controller With Error Detection And Retry Modes Of Operation", Rambus Inc, Aug 20, 2020.
• Ely K Tsern, Mark A Horowitz, Frederick A Ware. "United States Patent 10,621,023: Memory controller with error detection and retry modes of operation", Rambus Inc, Apr 14, 2020.
• Vladimir M Stojanovic, Andrew C Ho, Anthony Bessios, Fred F Chen, Elad Alon, Mark A Horowitz. "United States Patent 10,411,923: High speed signaling system with adaptive transmit pre-emphasis", Rambus Inc, Sep 10, 2019.
• Mark A Horowitz, Craig E Hampel, Alfredo Moncayo, Kevin S Donnelly, Jared L Zerbe. "United States Patent 10,366,045: Flash controller to provide a value that represents a parameter to a flash memory", Rambus Inc, Jul 30, 2019.
• Noy Cohen, Marc S Levoy, Michael J Broxton, Logan Grosenick, Samuel Yang, Aaron Andalman, Karl A Disseroth, Mark A Horowitz. "United States Patent 10,317,597: Light-field microscopy with phase masking", Leland Stanford Junior University, Jun 11, 2019.
• Jared LeVan Zerbe, Kevin S Donnelly, Stefanos Sidiropoulos, Donald C Stark, Mark A Horowitz, Leung Yu, Roxanne Vu, Jun Kim, Bruno W Garlepp, Tsyr-Chyang Ho, Benedict Chung-Kwong Lau. "United States Patent 10,310,999: Flash memory controller with calibrated data communication", Rambus Inc, Jun 4, 2019.
• Jared L Zerbe, Bruno W Garlepp, Pak S Chau, Kevin S Donnelly, Mark A Horowitz, Stefanos Sidiropoulos, Billy W Garrett Jr, Carl W Werner. "United States Patent 9,998,305: Multi-PAM output driver with distortion compensation", Rambus Inc