Yale Patt enjoys equally teaching required undergraduate courses and advanced graduate seminars.  He directs the research of nine PhD students in high performance computer architecture and implementation. His research results have been adopted extensively in the high performance microprocessors of today. 

He has consulted extensively in the computer industry for the past 30 years, helping major manufacturers design high peformance microprocessors and systems.  He is vitally concerned with the way we introduce computing to undergraduate computer science and engineering majors.

In that regard, he developed (with Professor Kevin Compton) EECS 100 at Michigan in 1995, and ECE 306 at Texas in 2000.  His "motivated bottom-up approach" is captured in the textbook, Introduction to Computing Systems: from bits and gates to C and beyond, written together with his former PhD student Professor Sanjay Patel of the University of Illinois.  They are currently working on the third edition.  Even though the course represents a major departure from the old, traditional CS1, CS2 approach, there have already been more than 100 adoptions.  He taught the course four times at Michigan, and is teaching it Fall, 2006 for the fourth time at UT Austin, this time to 367 freshmen. 

Patt earned BS (Northeastern), MS and PhD (Stanford) degrees in electrical engineering. He is a Fellow of both the IEEE and the ACM.

He received the Emmanuel R. Piore Award (one of the IEEE Fields Medals) in 1995, the ACM/IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award (the highest honor in the field of Computer Architecture) in 1996, the IEEE W.W.McDowell Award in 1999, the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award in 2000, and the IEEE Charles Babbage Award in 2005.  At Michigan, he was recognized with the Outstanding Professor of the Year Award from Michigan undergraduates in 1992, the Excellence in Teaching Award both from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (1995) and from the College of Engineering (1996), and the Arthur Thurneau Professorship in 1998. At Texas, he has received the Texas Excellence Teaching Award and the Dad's Association Teaching Fellowship, both in 2002. He was named Outstanding ACM Lecturer in 1998-1999, and in 2000-2001

• Faster and Faster Microprocessors: Are the challenges getting too hard for us to continue to deliver: For the past thirty some years, the individual microprocessor's performance has continued to skyrocket, partly due to the physics which has put more and more transistors on each chip operating at higher and higher frequencies and, partly due to t...
• Rambling after all these years: After more than 30 years of teaching, while at the same time having some success at research and consulting in the high-tech microprocessor area, I have acquired some opinions on education. If you let me, I would be happy to share some of them. This ...
• The Importance of the Freshman Course for Majors : Now that I have published a textbook on the subject (Introduction to Computing Systems: from bits and gates to C and beyond, with Sanjay J. Patel, McGraw-Hill, second edition, 2004) all my credibility is at risk. Nonetheless, I push onward. I believe...
• The Microprocessor: Its Characteristics Ten Years from now: The number of transistors on a single chip has grown from 2300 on the original Intel 4004 to over one billion today. In just a few years, the solid-state circuits people are projecting more than ten billion transistors, and a clock frequency in exces...