CE/VLSI Preliminary Examination ("Prelims")

• The prelims committee, consisting of three professors, will choose 3-5 academic papers on a topic that the student and committee agree upon. The committee may also recommend a textbook or tutorial paper for background reading.
• The student will prepare a paper of approximately 10 pages with the following main sections:
  1. Introduction, which states the problem, previous solutions, and ideas for future work at a high level;
  2. Preliminary definitions, which defines the problem formally;
  3. Previous work, which synthesizes the ideas presented in the assigned papers;
  4. Potential future work, which describes directions for future work, including at least one well-defined idea;
  5. Discussion and conclusions, which places the work in context of other work in the field.
  The student may consult with the committee throughout the writing process.
• The student will prepare a 30 minute oral presentation on the topic that roughly parallels the paper in structure but may focus on certain aspects while summarizing or skipping others.
• The committee may ask questions on the presentation and related material during and after the presentation. The student should expect about 30 minutes of questions.
• The paper is due one week before the presentation.

• Read all papers and background material before writing. Synthesize the ideas in your head and on scratch paper; then begin to write.
• The Previous work section, which is the main part of the paper, should not be a mere retelling of the various papers in chronological order. Rather, there should be a true synthesis of ideas. One would expect to see common definitions (not necessarily coming from any one paper), common lemmas or theorems, comparisons of expressiveness/performance/power/etc., relationships of ideas, possible generalizations, identification of different or similar mathematical foundations, etc.
• The presentation should be accessible to your colleagues, who may be uninformed on the topic. That is, the audience should walk away from the presentation having learned something.
• Read the introductory chapters or sections of several PhD theses to see how others have handled literature reviews.
• Use the prelims as an opportunity to learn LaTeX.