In the winter quarter of his junior year, computer engineering major Chad Lindhorst had a hole in his schedule. A lucky hole, as it turned out. “I looked through the catalog and found Chris Diorio’s Introduction to VLSI Design course. I didn’t know anything about it, but it was the only course that fit my schedule.”

Chad loved the course. “We got to do detailed design of integrated circuits from scratch—from the very bottom, the simplest primitives. It was a totally different level of circuit design from what’s done in other classes, much closer to the physics involved.” It didn’t hurt that Professor Diorio was a master teacher, who would later win one of the UW’s coveted Distinguished Teaching Awards. “We had so much fun,” says Chad, “that three of my classmates and I decided to do an honors project with Chris.” In that project, the students produced a new kind of integrated circuit, from design through testing and fabrication. “It was a very rare opportunity for us as undergraduates. We’re writing up patent applications for one of the techniques we developed.”

In another stroke of luck, Chad graduated from the UW just as Chris Diorio and his own mentor from Caltech, Carver Mead, were putting together a new company called Impinj. Its ground- breaking “Self-Adaptive Silicon” technology, developed by Mead and Diorio, combines analog and digital functions on a single chip, which continuously recalibrates itself as operating conditions change. These “radically new microchips” (MIT Technology Review) promise to revolutionize wireless communications.

Diorio invited Chad and a fellow student from the honors group to join Impinj. “I had another job all lined up, but Chris said, ‘Come on, it’ll be fun.’ I think I was actually Impinj’s first employee. And it has been fun. There’s so much interesting work to do here it’s amazing. We’re taking a technology that hasn’t even been proven yet in industry and thinking up a lot of new uses for it. It’s an adventure.”