Peter Kinget Receives National Award for VLSI Design Lab Course

Peter Kinget, the Bernard J. Lechner Professor of Electrical Engineering, has been selected to receive the 2026 Innovative Program Award from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) for his development and sustained leadership of the VLSI Design Lab course at Columbia Engineering.

The award, which recognizes programs that have produced measurable improvements in the quality of electrical and computer engineering education, will be presented at ECEDHA's annual conference in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico, on March 21.

The VLSI Design Lab (ELEN E6350) is built around a simple premise: students should design, fabricate, and test a real silicon chip. Working in small teams over the course of a full academic year, graduate students conceive a mixed-signal integrated circuit, simulate and lay it out using industry-standard tools, and send the design to a commercial foundry for fabrication in a 65nm CMOS process. When the chips come back in the fall, students mount them on custom printed circuit boards and demonstrate working systems. These battery-powered, standalone devices have ranged from heart-rate monitors and audio amplifiers to RISC-V processors and biomedical sensors.

The course is structured to compress the entire professional IC design cycle into a classroom setting, giving students a level of hands-on experience that few programs in the country can match.

The course has evolved significantly since its early years, when designs were fabricated through MOSIS using older process nodes. An ongoing partnership with Apple Inc., which sponsors chip fabrication and provides engineers to mentor student teams and judge final designs, has helped the lab keep pace with industry-grade technology and professional expectations. The course is now being taught by Kinget's colleagues in the electrical engineering department, including Mingoo Seok, who taught the course last year, and Harish Krishnaswamy, who currently teaches it.

The ECEDHA honor is the latest in a growing list of recognitions for Kinget's teaching. In 2020, he became the inaugural recipient of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society's Innovative Education Award, and in 2025, he received a Columbia University Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching, one of just five recipients across the entire university

Kinget, an IEEE Fellow who joined the Columbia faculty in 2002, has built a research program spanning analog, radio-frequency, and sensing circuits. Holding 41 U.S. patents and having authored or co-authored over 250 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, his research record stands alongside a teaching legacy that colleagues and students regard as equally defining — with the VLSI Design Lab standing out as an example of a course that has shaped how an entire field is rethinking graduate engineering education for chip design.

Lead Photo Caption: Peter Kinget, Bernard J. Lechner Professor of Electrical Engineering

Lead Photo Credit: Timothy Lee