Interview with Christof Teuscher

Featured Engineer

Christof Teuscher

Christof Teuscher - Assistant Professor, ECE; Portland State University

How did you get into electronics/ engineering and when did you start?

One of my first major experiences with electricity was at 10, when I tried to measure how much current comes out of a power outlet with an ampere meter. That didn’t go well and resulted in an all-day power outage of our house and a melted ampere meter. Yet, that only made me more curious and in the next 10 years, I spent a major part of my free time soldering together electronic circuits for all kinds of applications. For example, I remember that my brother and I once built a remote controlled electronic ignition for fireworks. We felt like working for NASA. My first experience with computers consisted in watching my dad writing programs on a Commodore C64 computer, one of the first affordable personal computers.

Later, I first became an electronics engineer, then studied computer science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and got a M.S. and a Ph.D. before I did a postdoc at UC San Diego and at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

What research are you doing in your lab?

We work at the the forefront of emerging computing models an technologies. We study, rethink, model, and design the implementation of computations in silicon and non-silicon systems. An understanding of the phenomena provides a basis for better, smarter, and more robust computing paradigms, architectures, devices, algorithms, languages, and systems for applications such as embedded systems and biomolecular engineering. We are interested in bold, visionary, and transformational solutions to complex and critical problems needed for the medium- and long-term sustainability of the technological future of the computing disciplines.

The research is needs-, problem-, and phenomena-driven, with the goal to open new application domains. We use a radical interdisciplinary approach and apply tools from computer science, computer engineering, engineering, physics, biology, complex systems science, and cognitive science to the study and the design of new computing paradigms and machines.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

Because many of the hardware we imagine can’t be built yet, we heavily rely on simulations. My favorite tool is the lab’s blade server, a pretty sweet hyper-threaded multi-core machine with an additional 448 GPU cores. Many of our simulations take weeks, so we have a pretty insatiable hunger for cores.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

In these days, one of my favorite tools is MATLAB. If that doesn’t do the job, I’ll usually hack together custom C or C++ codes.

What is on your bookshelf?

I’m an absolute book lover, I guess partly because I never owned a TV in my life. There are currently 1119 books on my shelves. I keep a detailed database of all my books. I buy most technical books in my area that seem to be relevant. I also read lots of fiction, mostly contemporary.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve? (special way to analyze circuits, special process you use to make something, etc.)

Nah, no tricks, just hard work combined with lots of passion and dedication.

What has been your favorite project?

One of my favorite past projects is the BioWall. The project was also featured in the Xilinx Xcell journal.

The BioWall is a very fascinating and beautiful machine in so many ways. Another favorite is the NSF-funded molecular computing project (NSF grant no: 1028120) my team is involved in: “Computing with Biomolecules: From Network Motifs to Complex and Adaptive Systems.” Changing the building blocks from silicon transistors to enzymatic logic gates bears unique opportunities and challenges we’re trying to address.

What was the last thing you were organizing?

Since Fall 2010 I’ve been organizing the Nuts and Bold Ideas Seminar. The idea of the seminar is to provide an informal platform for ideas that are worth thinking about. Instigators are asked to present something different from their most recent research, paper, or talk. Ideas that challenge the status quo are of particular interest. The goal is to think big and different. The seminar is designed to foster creativity, innovation, inspiration, and to spur cross-pollination among disciplines.

What direction do you see your research heading in the next few years?

The end of miniaturization of silicon devices seems to be closer than ever, even though it’s probably still 10 years out. We’re hitting more and more physical limits, and at some point we won’t be able to make things smaller. While silicon-based electronics may never disappear, there are lots of opportunities and challenges with non-silicon devices. For example, in our NSF-sponsored biomolecular computing project (NSF grant no: 1028120) we use enzymes to build molecular learning machines that can adapt. The typical application domains for such machines are non-invasive diagnostics and intelligent therapeutics. In combination with the human body, non-silicon devices have many advantages because they can more easily be made bio-compatible.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

One of the biggest challenges the computing industry currently faces is an increase in parallelism, as you can for example observe with multi-core systems or GPUs. We neither have the algorithms nor the tools to exploit all the parallelism today’s computers offer efficiently. The other challenges I foresee are novel devices, computing substrates, and state variables. An example are memristive devices. Non-boolean computing and probabilistic computation will also play a major role in emerging devices.

What do you try to teach your students?

First of all, I want them to be passionate about what they are doing. There is nothing worse than not caring and not having a passion for what one does. Second, I want them to learn something. I see my role in helping them to be successful in their studies, in getting a job, and in pursuing a great career. I want to train highly knowledgeable, innovative, creative, and responsible professionals who will be successful in an ever-changing and challenging professional world. I also consider critical, ethical, and social thinking key to success. I have high expectations and believe that one should always strive for perfection. I will do everything to help students to reach my expectations.

What do you do when you don’t work?

That’s almost never the case. Research is my passion and my life. Nevertheless, I’ve been going to Burning Man for the last 5 years. That’s been an absolutely amazing experience in so many ways. It’s also the only week I can really disconnect from work, physically and mentally. Last year we ran a cheese fondue bar and this year we’ll be organizing our own theme camp.