Bio
Trent McConaghy is co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Solido Design Automation Inc., which provides variation-aware design tools for custom circuit designers at major semiconductor vendors. He was a co-founder and Chief Scientist of Analog Design Automation Inc., which was acquired by Synopsys Inc. in 2004. Prior to that, he did intelligent systems research for the Canadian Department of National Defense.
Trent received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, in 2008, with Dr. Georges Gielen as promotor. He received a Bachelor’s in Engineering (with great distinction), and a Bachelor’s in Computer Science (with great distinction), both from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1999.
He is author of the book "Variation-Aware Analog Structural Synthesis: A Computational Intelligence Approach" (Springer, 2009) with colleagues from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He is co-editor of the book "Genetic Programming Theory and Practice VII" (Springer, 2009). He has authored approximately 30 journal papers, book chapters, and conference papers, and has about 20 patents granted / pending. He has given invited talks / tutorials at many labs, universities, and conferences such as JPL, MIT, ICCAD, and DAC.
His doctoral thesis, entitled "Variation-Aware Knowledge Extraction and Structural Synthesis of Analog Integrated Circuits", won the international 2009 EDAA Outstanding Dissertation Award. His work was nominated for best paper in Design Automation and Test Europe, 2005. He was awarded the 2001 Outstanding Young Alumni Award by the University of Saskatchewan for significant accomplishments since graduation. In 1999, his team won the award for top senior thesis design in the U of S College of Engineering.
He co-organized the 2009 and 2010 "Genetic Programming Theory and Practice" workshops in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is regularly a technical program committee member and reviewer in both the CAD and computational intelligence fields, such as IEEE Trans CAD, ACM TODAES, Electronics Letters, to the IEEE Trans. Evolutionary Computation, Journal of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, GPTP, GECCO, CEC, ICES, etc. Trent serves on the Board of Directors of Clevor Technologies Inc., and of Solido Design Automation Inc.
His research interests include statistical machine learning, AI / computational intelligence, evolutionary computation, and nonlinear programming; with transistor-level CAD applications of variation-aware design, high-dimensional circuit modeling, analog topology design, automated sizing, knowledge extraction, and symbolic modeling.