AJ KleinOsowski’s motto in life is "enthusiasm
is contagious." This drives her throughout
her day whether working at Austin Research
Lab, where she is interning, or at the
University of Minnesota where she is pursuing
a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. As a twotime
recipient of the Ph.D. Fellowship Award
from IBM, she believes that IBM is a natural
choice for her current research work and one
of the few companies that has the resources
and nerve to take calculated risks that are concurrent
with her research goals.
From childhood, AJ has been exposed to computers
and a vast array of electronics, thanks to
her father’s career as an electronics technician.
However, she followed her mother’s job as an
accountant into college at the University of
Wisconsin at Milwaukee. While writing
accounting software programs she discovered
that she had a great affinity and interest for
computer science. She promptly changed over
to computer science and then went on to the
University of Minnesota where she is currently
pursuing her Ph.D in Electrical Engineering
under Professor David J. Lilja. In her first year
of graduate school, AJ spent considerable time
“playing in the sandbox,” a creative pool of
ideas in AJ’s mind. In time, she envisioned a
new, fault-tolerant, circuit family that she
named NanoBoxes. “Exploring the NanoBox
concept for nanoscale, high-fault-rate, device
technologies” has become the subject of her
Ph.D. work and thesis. It took her one-year to
fully develop her idea and then another two
years of working with her professor and collaborators
to establish funding for the project
and assemble a team of students. As the
founder of the NanoBox project, she became
the principle student investigator, leading a
team of 3 Ph.D. students and 6 Masters
Students. Since the official project kick-off in
January 2001, the project has had great success,
receiving 4 out of the 5 grants it applied
for.
AJ came to IBM through Professor Lilja’s
CAS Faculty Award with the Rochester site.
That first
summer,
she was
placed in
Austin to
work with
Systems
Group on the
POWER 5
Project. Once in
Austin, she came in contact with the
Exploratory VLSI group at the Austin
Research Laboratory. This summer, with the
renewal of her Fellowship, she returned to
Austin to work with Kevin Nowka and the
Exploratory VLSI group at the Austin
Research Laboratory. AJ is investigating
applications of her NanoBox circuit family for
FinFETs, a new research non-planar CMOS
device technology. AJ hopes to continue her
research on reliability techniques for circuits
and microarchitectures upon completion of
her Ph.D.
-By Irene Dhong, 2003 Austin CAS Summer Intern
