I’ve been attending DAC as an exhibitor since 1992, and serving on the executive committee since 2012. I am thrilled to serve as General Chair for the 54th iteration of this grand conference. (And no it’s not too early to think about DAC; the call for contributions is open now.) Through the years I have seen some big industry changes, most driven by the increasingly powerful tools and automation that this conference has been about — growth that fueled my career, as well!
My first job was as a chip designer at TRW, Sunnyvale back in the 1980s, and we had our own fab in Virginia, and my officemate wrote and maintained our chip design tools, as was pretty typical in those days. I worked at a series of hardware startups after that; and then took all that experience in hand to build better chip design tools. At Chronologic I led the engineering team that built the VCS simulator; then I started Surefire, where we built the SureCov and SureLint verification tools; we merged with Verisity and then into Cadence, where my team developed C-to-Silicon synthesis tools. If you’re curious, LinkedIn has most of the rest of the story, including the patents I’ve been issued.
