John Isakson

John Isakson received the B.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, NY, USA, in 1991, and the M.S.E.E. degree from the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA, in May 1998. After fulfilling his military service obligation as an Air Defense Artillery Officer at Fort Hood, TX, he returned to civilian life to pursue an engineering career. He briefly worked in a manufacturing facility as a quality engineer before taking on a job in custom integrated circuit layout with AMD, Austin. He also spent two years in Motorola’s Microcontroller Division where he gained experience not only in layout but also in circuit design, logic design, test, and verification. Since 1998, he has been part of the IBM’s Power Series Microprocessor Design Team, Austin. He served as a Circuit and Layout Design Engineer on the Power4 and Power5 microprocessors. He served as a Unit Lead on several System z projects and currently serves as a Nest Physical Design Product Owner on IBM Z. His interests are in incremental synthesis, design optimization through metal-only changes, and on-chip engineered bus design.