In 1984, Horowitz joined the Stanford faculty. At Stanford his research focused on VLSI circuits and he led a number of early RISC processor designs, including MIPS-X. His research has been in the fields of electrical engineering, computer science, and applying engineering tools to biology. He has worked on RISC processors, multiprocessor designs, low-power circuits, high-speed links, computational photography, and applying engineering to biology. In the 2000s he teamed up with Marc Levoy to work on computational photography, research which explored how to use computation to create better pictures, often by using data from multiple sensors. This research also explored light-field photography, which captured enough information to allow a computer to reconstruct the view to an arbitrary viewpoint. The need to capture light-fields to process led to the creation of the Stanford Camera Array, a system which could synchronize and collect images from 100 image sensors, as well as work that eventually led to the Lytro camera. In 2006, Horowitz received the IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits "for pioneering contributions to the design of high-performance digital integrated circuits and systems". In 2007, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his "leadership in high-bandwidth memory-interface technology and in scalable cache-coherent multiprocessor architectures." In 2008, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At the 2014 International Solid-State Circuits Conference, he presented his studies on the outlook for the semiconductor industry in Computing's Energy Problem .
Business
In 1990 Horowitz took a leave of absence from Stanford to work with Mike Farmwald on a new high-bandwidth DRAM design which, in April of that year, led to the formation of Rambus Inc., a company specializing in high-bandwidth memory technology. After working at Rambus for a year, he returned to Stanford and started a research program in high-speed input/output. Video game machines were early adopters of this technology, with Nintendo 64 and PlayStation 2 the first two mass-produced products to use the company's DRAMs. Intel later adopted the company's RDRAM processor interface, and Rambus memory chips were used in PCs in the late 1990s. Horowitz returned briefly to Rambus in 2005 to help start a research organization at the company and left the board of directors in 2011.
Awards and honors
IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits
J. Acken, A. Agarwal, G. Gulak, M. Horowitz, S. McFarling, S. Richardson, A. Salz, R. Simoni, D. Stark, and S. Tjiang, The MIPS-X RISC Microprocessor. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, MA, 1989. Foreword by J.L. Hennessy.
S. Bell, J. Pu, J. Hagerty, M. Horowitz, Compiling Algorithm for Heterogeneous Systems, Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2018.
Book Chapters
Multithreaded Computer Architectures, chapter 8 – "Architectural and Implementation Tradeoffs in the Design of Multiple-Context Processors", Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.
Design of High-Performance Microprocessor Circuits, "High-Speed Electrical Signaling", 2001.
Power Aware Design Methodologies, chapter 8 – "Energy-Efficient Design of High-Speed Links", Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.
Computational Imaging and Vision, Chapter 7 – "Synthetic Aperture Focusing using Dense Camera Arrays", Volume 35, 2007, pp. 159–172.
Methods in Enzymology, Chapter 13 – "Alignment of Cryo-Electron Tomography Datasets", Elsevier, 2010, pp. 343–367.
