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Posts Tagged ‘Phil Kaufman Award’

Verific: Sowing good, Reaping great

Thursday, December 21st, 2017

 


Verific Design Automation in based in Alameda
, not exactly Silicon Valley, but close enough to be within driving distance. The company has been in existence for almost 20 years and reports few competitors, if any. Instead, they see themselves as the de-facto standard for HDL language parsers, and as such can be found in just about every chip design flow.

In fact, according to Rick Carlson, Verific VP of Worldwide Sales, he’s more astonished with each passing day just how many places applications developed on top of Verific can be found. Not because he doubts the quality of the product, but because of the wide diversity of industries who are now developing chips.

Rick Carlson also knows a thing or two about building collegiality between the companies that constitute the EDA industry. He was one of the founders of the EDA Consortium 30 years ago, and the Phil Kaufman Award. We spoke at length last month.

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Wally Rhines: just the 7th Inning Stretch

Thursday, November 12th, 2015

 

Joyful relief probably best describes this evening’s event at the Fourth Street Summit Center in San Jose where the glitterati of EDA gathered to honor Mentor CEO Wally Rhines with a long-overdue CEDA/EDAC-sponsored Kaufman Award. Joyful relief and a sense of delicious mischief.

One should have known something was up when the trio in the corner – during cocktails on the 7th floor overlooking scenic downtown San Jose – launched into a tango so compelling one was forced to look over to the source of the music. Surprisingly and not surprisingly, it included Bob Gardner on bass. Tango and all, the music sashayed its way through the lively mesh of conversation that defined the crowded room in that pre-dinner hour.

When enough yummy hors d’oeuvres had been consumed, and just the right amount of Jazz Cellars wine – the winemaker himself now serving as the Executive Director of EDAC – the gong sounded, doors opened at one end of the room, and huge clumps of happy revelers jostled into the adjoining hall to seek out their assigned tables and grab their chairs, all anticipating good food and great fun.

With at least 200 people in attendance, CEDA and EDAC did not disappoint. Of course, it’s hard to avoid a home run when the irrepressible Wally Rhines is at the center of the play, but this evening CEDA/EDAC delivered up something more akin to a grand slam.

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Kaufman Award: My vote goes to Wally

Thursday, August 20th, 2015

 

As you all know, the Kaufman Award is presented every 12 to 18 months by the EDA industry, with support from the EDA Consortium and the IEEE Council on EDA.

Year in and year out, an individual from industry or academia is honored for providing a “demonstrable impact on electronic design through contributions in the field of EDA,” an impact in business, or industry direction and promotion, or technology and engineering, or education and mentoring.

Based on those parameters, in recent years we’ve seen luminaries such as Dr. Lucio Lanza, Dr. Chenming Hu, Dr. C.L. Liu, Mr. Pat Pistilli, Dr. Randy Bryant, and Dr. Aart de Geus receive this highly coveted commendation in reflection of their hard work, innovation, and dedication to EDA.

Now the fall of the year is upon us, and even though there is no date as yet posted to the EDAC website to indicate which day and hour in November this year’s Kaufman Award will be presented, or to whom, it’s a good guess the info will not be long in coming. It’s my hope that when the news does break, the answer will be Dr. Walden C. Rhines.

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Leonardo, Michelangelo, Lucio: A taxonomy of Italian Genius

Thursday, October 16th, 2014

 

There are three types of Italian genius. Leonardo da Vinci characterized one with his brilliant problem solving, creative innovations in the arts and sciences, diverse dabblings that often left completion dates for commissioned projects as sfumato as his oils, and aggressive self-promotion. An apocryphal testimonial to this last: When he finished the Mona Lisa in the early 1500s, he invited friends and foe alike into his studio to show off what he assured them would be the Next Big Thing. Humility was not in Leonardo’s toolkit.

Born in 1475, Michelangelo Buonarroti exemplified a second type of Italian genius. Intense, focused, gifted with extraordinary talents in the visual arts and architecture, and rumored to be so impassioned by his work as to go weeks on end without sleep, his talent was such that monumental commissions were forced upon him by the political and religious powers of the day, although he argued bitterly against the scale of such assignments. He became increasingly cantankerous with age, and in angry response to criticism of one commission in particular, famously painted himself into his vast Last Judgment as a flayed skin victimized by his patrons. Charm and affability were not in Michelangelo’s toolkit.

Fast forward five centuries and find now a completely different type of Italian genius. Shaped by mid-20th century forces in technology, and brought to full fruition in the fertile fields of Silicon Valley, Lucio Lanza exemplifies a third class in the taxonomy, one that encompasses the upsides of those 16th century icons – intelligence, creativity, a passion for innovation and work, a sense of history – without the downsides – egomania, rough irritability, inability to finish a project, or avoid a project too big to handle.

In the wake of two High-Renaissance Florentians, it took one High-Tech Milanese to fill out the taxonomy of Italian genius. Here in the 21st century, Lucio Lanza is in a modern class of his own.

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IDAC: What EDAC might have been

Wednesday, January 22nd, 2014

 

Before there was EDAC, there was IDAC. But before there was IDAC, there was just DA – Design Automation without Community or Consortium. The EDA industry consisted of a small number of large companies controlling the conversation, and a larger number of smaller companies who thought that if they linked hands they could do it better. It was Rick Carlson and Dave Millman who decided in 1986 to bring that group of small companies together to create IDAC, which stood for Independent Design Automation Companies.

According to Carlson, speaking on a recent phone call, “We wanted to get the small independent companies to work together in a cooperative way to deliver a solution, a flow, that was equal to or better than the big companies. And because even then, the leading-edge algorithms always came out of these small startups, we thought we had good solutions that the customers would appreciate.

“But there was a deeper, more fundamental issue that we hoped to solve by creating IDAC and that was how to grow the industry and foster innovation, whether in through a startup or an established player.”

Things didn’t work out exactly like Carlson and Millman had hoped for.

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DAC 2013: Top 10 from Day 1 in Austin

Monday, June 3rd, 2013

 

The Design Automation Conference is mostly about People who need People, so my Top Ten list from Day 1 in Austin here at the 50th DAC is about just that: The Luckiest People in the World.


No. 10)
Rushing up to Room 18 on Level 4 of the Austin Convention Center to attend the DFM&Y Workshop at 9 am, only to find that I couldn’t get in because I hadn’t paid. Why is this disappointment on the list of favorites?

Because on my way back down to Level 1, I ran into Jill Jacbos who’s been working overtime here in Austin on behalf of Accellera Systems Initiative (Stan Krolikoski received the 2013 Leadership Award at the 7 am breakfast today), the North American SystemC Users Group Meeting (taking place all day today on Level 3), and Jim Hogans’ Hot Zone Party tonight at Austin City Limit’s Moody Theater.

Jim’s efforts, and those of the folks helping him, are all to raise money for his Heart of Technology charity, which is donating funds raised in Austin to CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) of Travis County, Texas. If you want to donate, you can do so at Jim’s website.

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DAC 2013: Three marvelous awards in Austin

Wednesday, April 24th, 2013

 

If you’ve been on the fence about coming to the Design Automation Conference in June, hesitate no longer. There will be wonderful things to see there, and marvelous accomplishments to celebrate. At least three awards set to be presented in Austin will go to individuals who have contributed significantly to innovations and energies in the industry, each award being given in the name of a noted role model whose own contributions have pushed the envelope of the industry forward.

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2013 Kaufman Award: U.C. Berkeley’s Chenming Hu

Wednesday, April 3rd, 2013

 

The EDA Consortium and the IEEE Council of EDA together announced today the recipient of this year’s Phil Kaufman Award for distinguished contributions to EDA – Chenming Hu, TSMC Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at U.C. Berkeley.

Per the Press Release: “Dr. Chenming Hu is being recognized for his contributions in device physics, device modeling, and device reliability through BSIM and BERT models that have transformed the semiconductor manufacturing and EDA industries. Dr. Hu’s team invented the revolutionary 3D finFET transistor structure that simultaneously achieves size and power reduction to enable continued scaling of the microelectronic chips.”

Prof. Hu is a marvelous choice on the part of both EDAC and CEDA, but it is important to note that his contributions in EDA are the basis for the Phil Kaufman Award, not his work on the finFET – even though the latter is the hot topic in semiconductors today.

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