Berkeley Engineering: A Tradition of Impact in Research
uPre-stressed Concrete
uGround Fault Interrupter
uBerkeley Unix
uRelational Database Technology (following IBM)
uElectronic Design Automation: SPICE to Synopsys
uRISC (with Stanford), RAID
uCyberCut online manufacturing systems
uNOW (Networks of Workstations)
uSalmon with antifreeze (grapes next?)
uIEEE Floating Point
uInfopad (now called WebPad, TabletPC,…)
uSemiconductor Devices & Modeling
uMEMS, Smart Dust, …
u
uBerkeley faculty are fundamentally motivated by high-potential-impact, long-range research
Berkeley Unix which played a key role in accelerating the growth of engineering workstations as well as the Internet
Relational Database Technology, where three major relational database vendors, Computer Associates, Sybase, and Informix, representing half of the annual sales in this multi-billion dollar software industry segment, can trace their database products to companies founded by Berkeley faculty or students
Electronic design automation, where almost all of the major offerings are based on Berkeley technology and the two leading companies, founded by Berkeley faculty and students (Cadence and Synopsys) represent 7,500 jobs and $2.5B annual revenues--over half of the industry revenues and this is an industry that the US dominates
RAID is now a $12 billion per year storage industry segment
Networks of workstations for scalable high performance computing
Velvel Kahan’s IEEE Floating point, for which he won the Turing Award. $1Trillion worth of computers use it.
Infopad: Basis of the Webpad; pioneered by Brodersen & Rabaey, now directing BWRC
Finfet: First IC facility in the nation,  Chenming Hu & Jeff Bokor, 20nm channel
MEMS: airbag chip, smart dust…
NMR, GFI, …
These are all in the past now, and I only mention them to show what can be done and what we are sure to do again. But we are about research, about the future, and the Internet-initiated revolution has only just begun! What a time to be straddling the fence in a University, able to observe and influence what is happening throughout the world.
What is common here? These are about infrastructure, not gadgets… we like gadgets too, but broad, infrastructural changes, changing the way we go about things, is what we like to do at Berkeley.