Alvin M. Despain

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Alvin M. Despain, an American electrical engineer, and co-founder and CTO of Acorn Technologies until his retirement in 2008. He holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Utah in 1966, and has been a professor at University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, Utah State University, University of Utah, and University of Southern California, where he is professor emeritus since 2001. His research interests include computer architecture, multiprocessor systems, logic programming, quantum computation and design automation.

=Computer Chess= Already in the 70s, Despain designed a chess machine as described by Ozalp Babaoglu in his Master's thesis , but never obtained funding for full construction. In 1990, along with James Testa, Despain co-authored on the Berkeley Chess Microprocessor (BCM). The BCM was apparently used in Testa's chess entity Zerker, a promising newcomer at ACM 1990 as it reported 7,000,000 moves per second, roughly three times faster than Deep Thought at that time, but damage to the machine during shipment forced its withdrawal , and it seems the project was later abandoned.

=Selected Publications=

1970 ...

 * Alvin M. Despain, David A. Patterson (1978). X-Tree: A Tree Structured Multi-Processor Computer Architecture. ISCA 1978
 * Alvin M. Despain (1979). Very Fast Fourier Transform Algorithms Hardware for Implementation. IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 28, No. 5
 * Philip Bitar, Alvin M. Despain (1986). Multiprocessor Cache Synchronization: Issues, Innovations, Evolution. ISCA 1986
 * Alvin M. Despain (1988). Prolog at Berkeley. COMPCON 1988

1990 ...

 * James Testa, Alvin M. Despain (1990). A CMOS VLSI chess microprocessor. University of California, Berkeley, IEEE Custom Integrated Circuit Conference
 * Bruce K. Holmer, Alvin M. Despain (1991). Viewing Instruction Set Design as an Optimization Problem. MICRO 1991
 * Chi-Ying Tsui, Massoud Pedram, Alvin M. Despain (1993). Technology decomposition and mapping targeting low power dissipation. DAC 1993, pdf
 * Chi-Ying Tsui, Massoud Pedram, Alvin M. Despain (1993). https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/580061 Efficient estimation of dynamic power consumption under a real delay model]. ICCAD 1993
 * Alvin M. Despain (1994). Symbolic Supercomputing. in Frontiers of Supercomputing II: A National Reassessment

1995 ...

 * Ing-Jer Huang, Alvin M. Despain (1995). Synthesis of application specific instruction sets. IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 14, No. 6
 * Kevin M. Obenland, Alvin M. Despain (1997). Models to Reduce the Complexity of Simulating a Quantum Computer. arXiv:quant-ph/9712004
 * Kevin M. Obenland, Alvin M. Despain (1998). Simulating the Effect of Decoherence and Inaccuracies on a Quantum Computer. arXiv:quant-ph/9804038
 * Kevin M. Obenland, Alvin M. Despain (1998). A Parallel Quantum Computer Simulator. arXiv:quant-ph/9804039
 * Chi-Ying Tsui, Massoud Pedram, Alvin M. Despain (1998). Low-power state assignment targeting two- and multilevel logic implementations. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, Vol. 17, No 12, pdf 94 preprint

=External Links=
 * The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Alvin Despain
 * Acorn Technologies Inc. - Dr. Alvin M. Despain
 * USC's Advanced Computer Architecture Laboratory

=References= Up one level