(Press-News.org) Mircea Stan was already feeling good owing to the Thanksgiving holiday when an email arrived saying he is a newly elected fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.
“The timing was great. It added to the natural happiness and gratitude I already felt at the time,” said Stan, the Virginia Microelectronics Consortium Professor and director of the computer engineering program in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia.
“The other obvious reaction was of course satisfaction that contributions I made over my entire career were recognized by the community.”
Stan dedicated that career to improving the power efficiency of computers and electronic systems without compromising their functionality or performance. Without his innovations, and the U.S. patents arising from them, everything from smartphones to cloud servers would devour considerably more energy and cost more to use.
“This was important during my Ph.D. and my early academic career,” Stan said. “It’s more important nowadays with the increasing electrical energy appetite of large data centers, which are stressing national power grids.”
Most notably, Stan co-invented the Bus-Invert method based on the idea of using data encoding — how binary digits (bits) are represented — to reduce the number of energy-consuming transitions from one to zero and vice versa. He and his co-author received the 2024 A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation for their 1995 paper on bus-invert coding.
This low-power technology is referenced in dozens of patents around the world and has been adopted as part of industry-wide standards used in electronic systems we use every day.
The NAI was established to encourage visionary academics and others to patent and commercialize their discoveries. The rank of fellow is the highest member distinction, given for “creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society."
The academy announced this year’s 169 new fellows on Dec. 11, a class that includes Nobel Prize winners and accounts for more than 5,300 U.S. patents.
“We all benefit from Mircea’s contributions every day,” said Jennifer L. West, dean of the UVA School of Engineering and Applied Science. “It is fitting that he has received this honor and recognition from the National Academy of Inventors.”
Stan’s department chair, American Telephone and Telegraph Company Professor of Engineering Scott Acton agreed, noting Stan’s profound influence in his research areas, which include artificial intelligence hardware, cyber-physical systems and processing in memory.
“Mircea has mentored generations of electrical and computer engineers while innovating technologies that underpin modern computing,” Acton said. “It is hard to beat that for impact.”
Stan arrived at UVA soon after earning his Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He established the High-Performance Low-Power Lab and commenced a career distinguished by awards, honors and esteemed roles.
Major awards include the Influential ISCA Paper Award at the 2018 International Symposium on Computer Architecture for a 2003 co-authored paper, “Temperature-aware microarchitecture,” and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He is named on nine “top picks” or “best paper” awards, including one in 2024, from IEEE society conferences and other symposia — some of which he has served as conference or technical committee chair.
A fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Stan has been an editor of several IEEE Transactions journals and is a three-time distinguished lecturer for IEEE’s Circuits and Systems Society and one-time distinguished lecturer for its Solid-State Circuits Society.
He also is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Eta Kappa Nu, Phi Kappa Phi and Sigma Xi academic and scientific honor societies.
At UVA Stan is a member of the Link Lab and associate director of the Center for Automata Processing, a research partnership with Micron Technologies to develop advanced high-volume and performance processing and memory computing solutions.
Even among these accolades, becoming an NAI Fellow is an important milestone, Stan said, in part because of what motivates him as a researcher and educator who has advised more than 25 Ph.D. students.
“I always liked to understand how things work and to make them work better if I could,” he said. “This curiosity still drives my life and career and is the most important trait that I’m trying to instill in my students.”
END
UVA’s low-power, high-performance computer power player Mircea Stan earns National Academy of Inventors fellowship
2026-01-02
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