James E. Smith is a computer engineer and an emeritus professor at the

University of Wisconsin–Madison The University of Wisconsin–Madison (University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin, UW, UW–Madison, or simply Madison) is a public land-grant research university in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. It was founded in 1848 when Wisconsin achieved st ...

. Smith was awarded the 1999

Eckert–Mauchly Award The Eckert–Mauchly Award recognizes contributions to digital systems and computer architecture. It is known as the computer architecture community’s most prestigious award. First awarded in 1979, it was named for John Presper Eckert and Joh ...

"for fundamental contributions to high performance micro-architecture, including saturating counters for

branch prediction In computer architecture, a branch predictor is a digital circuit that tries to guess which way a branch (e.g., an if–then–else structure) will go before this is known definitively. The purpose of the branch predictor is to improve the flow ...

reorder buffer A re-order buffer (ROB) is a hardware unit used in an extension to Tomasulo's algorithm to support out-of-order and speculative instruction execution. The extension forces instructions to be committed in-order. The buffer is a circular buffer (t ...

s for precise exceptions, decoupled access/execute architectures, and vector supercomputer organization memory, and

interconnect In telecommunications, interconnection is the physical linking of a carrier's network with equipment or facilities not belonging to that network. The term may refer to a connection between a carrier's facilities and the equipment belonging to its ...

s." Smith earned his BS in computer engineering and his MS and PhD in computer science from the

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United ...

in 1972, 1974, and 1976 respectively. He joined Wisconsin's ECE faculty in 1976 and took leaves of absence to work in industry between 1979 -'81 and 1984-'89.

References

University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty Living people University of Illinois alumni Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-engineer-stub