Dan Holcomb
PhD Candidate
EECS - UC Berkeley

Research Interests:

NoC
VLSI design
CAD
Particle-strike induced soft errors
Secure embedded hardware
Process variation in ICs

Selected Publications:

D. Holcomb, A. Rahmati, M. Salajegheh, W.P. Burleson, K. Fu, DRV-Fingerprinting: Using Data Retention Voltage of SRAM Cells for Chip Identification, Workshop on RFID Security and Privacy (RFIDSec) 2012

A. Rahmati, M. Salajegheh, D. Holcomb, J. Sorber, W.P. Burleson, K. Fu, TARDIS: Time and Remanence Decay in SRAM to Implement Secure Protocols on Embedded Devices without Clocks, USENIX Security Symposium, 2012

D. Holcomb, A. Gotmanov, M. Kishinevsky, S.A. Seshia, Compositional Performance Verification of NoC Designs, International Conference on  Formal Methods and Models for Codesign (MEMOCODE), 2012

D. Holcomb, B.A.Brady, S.A.Seshia, Abstraction-Based Performance Analysis of NoCs, Design Automation Conference 2011

B.A.Brady, D.Holcomb, S.A.Seshia, Counterexample-Guided SMT-Driven Optimal Buffer Sizing, Design Automation and Test in Europe 2011

L. Lin, D. Holcomb, D. K. Krishnappa, P. Shabadi, W. Burleson, Low-Power Sub-threshold Design of Secure Physical Unclonable Functions, ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED), August 2010.

R. A. Zaveri, P. B. Voss, C. M. Berkowitz, E. Fortner, J. Zheng, R. Zhang, R. J. Valente, R. L. Tanner, D. Holcomb, T. P. Hartley, L. Baran, Overnight atmospheric transport and chemical processing of photochemically aged Houston urban and petrochemical industrial plume, Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres, December 2010.

D. Holcomb, W. Li, S. A. Seshia, Design as you see FIT: System-Level Soft Error Analysis of Sequential Circuits, Design Automation and Test in Europe, 2009

D. Holcomb, W. Burleson, K. Fu, Power-up SRAM State as an Identifying Fingerprint and Source of True Random Numbers, IEEE Transactions on Computers, 2009

V. Ambrose, W. Burleson, D. Holcomb, S. Mukherjee, J. Pickholtz, A Fast and Accurate Method for Simulating Soft Errors in Large Combinatorial Logic Circuits, Intel Design and Test Technology Conference, 2007

D. Holcomb, W. Burleson, K. Fu. Initial SRAM state as a fingerprint and source of true random numbers for RFID tags. In Proceedings of the Conference on RFID Security, July 2007.

E.E. Riddle, P.B. Voss, A. Stohl, D. Holcomb, D. Maczka, K. Washburn, R.W. Talbot, Trajectory model validation during ICARTT-2004 using newly developed altitude-controlled meteorological balloons, Journal of Geophysical Research, December 2006.

About me:

I received my BS and MS degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UMass Amherst in 2005 and 2007, and have been at UC Berkeley since 2007. At UC Berkeley, my PhD advisor is Professor Sanjit Seshia. My research is focused on quantitative analysis of VLSI systems, and my dissertation will be on performance verification of uncore designs.

My undergraduate thesis was the design and implementation of a payload and control algorithm for the world’s smallest altitude controlled research balloons. I was fortunate to apply this work in two major air quality studies, of New York City and Houston pollution plumes.

During my M.S. at UMass, I researched particle-strike induced soft errors during two internships at Intel, and researched RFID security at UMass. My M.S. thesis was on low cost device identification and random number generation in integrated circuits.