Norris High School Alumni Association 2009 Hall of Fame Inductee

Byron Krauter

Byron grew up in Cortland and graduated from Norris in 1972.  While he didn’t receive the highest marks in his class and was perhaps best remembered for being an amateur “bootlegger”, he did buckle down when he went off to college. 

Byron earned his B.S. degree in physics and mathematics at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, in 1976.   He graduated with high distinction and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.  He earned his M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Nebraska in 1978.  His studies focused on semiconductor device modeling and his thesis title was “An Analytical Model of a Backwall MIS Schottky-Barrier Solar Cell”.  

He earned his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, in 1995.  His research focused on electromagnetic extraction of computer interconnects and his thesis title was “Formulating Sparse Partial Inductance Matrices”.

Byron has worked at IBM since 1979. He started his IBM career in Vermont and will in all likelihood, finish it in Texas.  He has worked on many aspects of computer chip design and on every IBM Power chip/system since its inception in the late 80’s.  He currently works on the electrical chip-package interface problem.  That is how to send thousands of signals from one chip to another at gigahertz speeds and how to keep the power supply roughly constant inside the VLSI chips during this activity.  He develops proprietary electromagnetic extraction and simulation software tools to help solve these signal integrity and power distribution problems.   

His other work at IBM has included NMOS and CMOS transistor design, CMOS circuit design, VLSI chip integration, VLSI global clock distribution design and analysis, package design and analysis and CAD tool development for on chip interconnect analysis.  His current research interests include sparse boundary element method (BEM) techniques for packaging and interconnect analysis.

Byron has co-authored 38 conference and journal publications, co- holds 13 patents, has 6 others pending and 2 more being filed.  He lectures at the University of Texas at Austin (on I/O and ESD circuit design, noise and power delivery & management) and presents an occasional conference tutorial. 

Byron is a Senior Member of IEEE.   He was a Semiconductor Research Corporation Industry Mentor for Dr. Larry Pileggi at Carnegie Mellon University for more than 10 years and helped supervise the doctoral studies of three students Carnegie Mellon University and one at the University of Texas.  He served on the Design Automation Conference Technical Program Committee from 2001-2004 and reviews papers for IEEE Transactions On Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems.  He was a contributor and guest editor for the above journals “Special Issue on On-Chip Inductance in High-Speed Integrated Circuits” in 2002. 

Byron makes better wine now and he has not operated a still for at least 36 years.  His other hobbies include traveling and dancing with his wife, Barbara.