Andrew Lines

Caltech alumni, Fulcrum Microsystems founder, Intel Principal Engineer via acquisition. Likely to be found in Portland, Oregon.

My Mom has a nice web page too.

Publications

Patents

IN/Lines-Andrew AND (AN/Microsoft OR AN/"California Institute of Technology" OR AN/Fulcrum OR AN/Intel)

Asynchronous VLSI

My specialty is designing chips without clocks. I began in 1993 as a Caltech undergrad, continued in the PhD program until 1999, then founded Fulcrum Microsystems with Uri Cummings in 2000. After 12 years and 4 products, we were bought by Intel in 2011, where I remain.

Here are some chips from the Caltech days:

Asynchronous Digital Filter (1995)

Mandelbrot Sets

I wrote my first Mandelbrot Set rendering program in high school. It was very clever and computationally efficient. Recently I wrote another version which is just brute force. But computers have come a long ways since my 386/387. Here are a few really, really big plots:

Entire Mandelbrot Set

More recently I added support for Julia sets and a full-color scheme:

Julia 1

Minimal Surfaces

One day I got bored and rewrote a high school science project of mine. It approximately solves for minimal area surfaces on parametric boundary curves. This is the same shape you get with soap films on a wire frame. Here are some nifty pictures:

Helicoid

CS 174 Project

Caltech's CS 174 involves writing a rendering and image processing program. Some interesting pictures are linked below:

Fractal mountains

Beam Tracer

This was once planned to be part of Fulcrum's core technology, but we quickly abandoned graphics to do networking. Someday I'd like to finish this rendering algorithm. Fractals make great test cases since you can easily scale up the polygon count. They also look cool. Also I converted the polygons of a Quake2 level (Sewer64).

Koch Tetrahedron

Quantum Solver

3D Mouse Rotation Patent

This is patent for a software algorithm I invented while working as an intern at Microsoft in the summer of 1991. It allows you to grab the corner of a 3D graph and rotate it by dragging it with the mouse. The particular improvement here is that the graph only rotates about the X and Y axes (not Z), and the point you grab stays under the mouse pointer (if possible). The movement is also easily reversible. You used to be able to demo my coding of this algorithm in any copy of Microsoft Excel, Graph, and Word since around 1992. However, they removed my feature around 2010 about when the patent expried. There was some wailing and gnashing of teeth on the webs.

Patent 5557714