Peter A. Beerel

Professor & Division Director, Computer Engineering Division
Ming Hsieh Electrical Engineering Department
Viterbi School of Engineering

Dr. Beerel received his B.S.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, in 1989 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 1991 and 1994, respectively. He joined the the Department of Electrical Engineering--Systems at USC in 1994. Dr. Beerel was the Faculty Director of Innovation Studies at the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation from 2006 to 2008 and the Faculty Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Engineering for the Viterbi School of Engineering from 2010 to 2017.

Dr. Beerel has also consulted for Trellisware in the area of communication hardware design as well as Yuni Networks and AMCC in the area of network chip analysis and verification. He was on a leave of absence from USC between June 2002 to September 2004, during which time he served as Vice-President of CAD and Verification at Fulcrum Microsystems. In May of 2008, he took a second leave of absence from USC and co-founded TimeLess Design Automation with one of his Ph.D. students, Dr. Georgios Dimou. Their mission was to demonstrate and commercialize an asynchronous ASIC flow. They were successful and sold the company in July of 2010 to Fulcrum Microsystems. Fulcrum Microsystems was acquired by Intel in 2011 and became its Switch Router Division at which he also worked as a Chief Scientist, Technology Development until Spring 2015. In 2015, his Ph.D. student, Dylan Hand, co-founded a second company, Reduced Energy Microsystems, to commercialize an asynchronous ASIC flow for ultra-low-power systems. Dr. Beerel joined REM as Chief Scientist in 2016.. 

Dr. Beerel's research interests include a variety of topics in CAD and asynchronous VLSI design. He has been a member of the technical program committee for the International Symposium on Advanced Research in Asynchronous Circuits and Systems since 1997, was Program Co-chair for ASYNC'98 and ASYNC'16, General Co-chair for ASYNC'07 and General Chair for ASYNC'13, and has served on its Steering Committee.  Dr. Beerel was a recipient of an Outstanding Teaching Award in 1997 and the Junior Research Award in 1998 and the Dean's Faculty Award for Service in 2011, all from USC's School of Engineering. He received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award and a 1995 Zumberge Fellowship. He was also co-winner of the Charles E. Molnar award for two papers published in ASYNC'97 that best bridged theory and practice of asynchronous system design and was a co-recipient of the best paper award in ASYNC'99 and co-author of the best paper in ASYNC'2014. He was the 2008 recipient of the IEEE Region 6 Outstanding Engineer Award for significantly advancing the application of asynchronous circuits to modern VLSI chips.