Howard A. Landman is a mathematician, computer scientist, engineer, and amateur physicist whose career has spanned computer-aided design, logic synthesis, integrated-circuit design, and software. He earned a B.A. in Mathematics with Honors from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a Hertz Foundation Scholar and placed among the top 100 U.S. contestants in the Putnam Mathematical Competition. He later received an M.S. in Computer Science, also from Berkeley.
As a CS graduate student at Berkeley, Landman worked on the RISC I microprocessor, an early pioneering RISC design. He wrote mkpla, a tool for automatically generating physical layouts of programmable logic arrays; three PLAs generated by the program were incorporated into RISC I, including its main instruction decoder. He also performed portions of the chip’s hand layout.
Landman subsequently worked in CAD and integrated-circuit design at Metheus, Silicon Compilers, Intel, Sun Microsystems, HaL Computer Systems, and other companies. At Toshiba America Electronic Components, he initially served as a logic-synthesis specialist on the Sony PlayStation 2 Emotion Engine project, then took over its physical-design team and led it through first tapeout. The first silicon was fully functional; later versions ultimately shipped in more than 23 million PlayStation 2 systems.
He has many engineering publications; two pure math papers published in Combinatorial Game Theory; wrote a computer Go playing program in 1988 that took 3rd place in North America; contributed sequences to the OEIS; wrote FlowFields for the G-Force music visualizer; co-designed the VEST stream cypher; had a poem cited in a technical paper about pairing algorithms for online dating sites; and wrote a visual interface for dendrochronology (tree ring databases).
After retiring from the semiconductor industry, Landman became interested in quantum computing and foundational questions in physics. His current work explores possible connections between quantum mechanics and general relativity through gravitational and electromagnetic time dilation, including experimentally testable predictions.
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