Dr. Farimah Farahmandi has been named as the inaugural holder of the Walden C. Rhines Endowed Professorship for Hardware Security. Farahmandi is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and also serves as the associate director of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity (FICS) Research.
The endowment will support Dr. Farahmandi’s research program which primarily focuses on hardware security verification and validation. Farahmandi works to apply AI-based approaches to hardware security, ensuring the integrity of microelectronics in pre- and post- fabrication stages. She is well-known in the hardware security community for her pioneering research in the field of security verification, most notably for her work towards establishing the security, safety, and reliability of system-on-chips (SoCs) and system-in-packages (SiPs) deployed to modern critical industrial and DoD applications.
“Receiving such a prestigious endowment, usually reserved for senior faculty, at this early part of her career speaks highly of Dr. Farahmandi’s accomplishments. In her community, she is known as an innovator, leader, and outstanding collaborator.”
Dr. Mark Tehranipoor
Sachio Semmoto Chair of ECE
Walden ‘Wally’ Rhines
Dr. Walden Rhines is currently the president and CEO of Cornami, Inc., a fabless software/semiconductor company focused on intelligent computing for fully homomorphic encryption and machine learning. He was previously CEO of Mentor Graphics for 25 years and Chairman of the Board for 17 years. During his tenure at Mentor, revenue nearly quadrupled and market value of the company increased by ten times.
Prior to joining Mentor Graphics, Dr. Rhines was executive VP of the semiconductor group at Texas Instruments (TI), responsible for their worldwide semiconductor business. During his 21 years at TI, he was president of the data systems group, held numerous semiconductor executive management positions, and was directly responsible for the creation and growth of the digital signal processing business which eventually comprised about 50 percent of TI’s total revenue.
Learn more about Dr. Rhines and the support he provides to the department here.