From Berkeley researcher to EECS department head
They told him that it wouldn’t work. “When we went to conferences, they did not believe that complex digital circuits could reliably operate at low voltages.”
Then a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Anantha P. Chandrakasan wasn’t entirely sure it would work either.
In the end, though, his low-power chip designs did work, and one year later, Chandrakasan gave one of the most influential talks in the history of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference. So many people attended that some couldn’t even get close enough to hear, so the organizers asked him to give the talk a second time — a first for the conference.