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DO N ALD O . P EDER S O N
1925–2004
Elected in 1974
“For leadership in integrated circuits research and
innovation in related computer-aided design.”
By Paul R. Gray, David A. Hodges, and
A. Richard Newton
D on Oscar Pederson was born on September 30, 1925, in
Hallock, Minnesota. He entered Iowa State College in the
fall of 1943 but was soon drafted. He served in Germany as
a private in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946. After the war,
he completed his undergraduate education at North Dakota
Agricultural College (now North Dakota State University),
where he earned a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1948. He
earned master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering
from Stanford University in 1949 and 1951, respectively. After
receiving his Ph.D., Pederson stayed on for a period as a
researcher in Stanford’s electronics research lab. From 1953 to
1955, he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories, in Murray Hill,
New Jersey, and also taught night classes at Newark College
of Engineering (now the New Jersey Institute of Technology).
Soon Don concluded that he enjoyed teaching even more
than his work at Bell Laboratories. In 1955 he contacted
acquaintances in California and subsequently was offered and
accepted a position as an assistant professor at the University
of California at Berkeley. He was an exciting and popular
teacher, well remembered by generations of students. With
colleague Ernest Kuh, he coauthored Principles of Circuit
Synthesis (McGraw-Hill, 1959), a leading undergraduate text of
its time. Later he authored another textbook, Electronic Circuits
227
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228 MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
(McGraw-Hill, 1965). His tenure at Berkeley included stints
as director of the campus’s Electronics Research Laboratory
and as vice chair and chair of the Department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Sciences. He retired in 1991.
The year 1959 marked the invention of the integrated
circuit, changing the world of electronics. Don foresaw
that dramatic reductions in the size and cost of electronics
would become possible. He became the preeminent pioneer
in university research and teaching on integrated circuits,
now generally known as “microchips.” Don decided that to
undertake research in integrated circuits and to teach students
to design them, the university needed its own semiconductor
fabrication facility. When he voiced this idea, he met a host of
objections—building such a facility was too complicated; his
group was made up of engineers, not chemists; the university
had no money for expensive fabrication equipment; and the
project simply could not be done. Ignoring the objections,
Pederson, with Professors Tom Everhart, Paul Morton, and Bob
Pepper and a group of graduate students, started designing
the facility. “Never wait for approval. Don’t tell anyone you
are doing something. Just do it,” Pederson said later. “That’s
my motto.”
Resourcefulness trumped the many difficulties. By 1962
the new facility was operational, producing publishable
research and educating a new breed of engineers. Notable
leaders from industry visited and praised the facility, the
first microfabrication facility at a university. Graduates of the
program soon became leaders in the semiconductor industry.
Microfabrication capabilities at Berkeley have advanced and
grown steadily ever since. As of 2006, several hundred students
and faculty members from a wide range of academic fields had
made use of this extremely flexible research facility.
In the mid-1960s, Don became interested in the application
of computer aids to the analysis of integrated circuits. He
and his students used a Bendix G15 minicomputer (the very
one now displayed in the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum
of American History) with only a typewriter and paper tape
input and output, to try to gain a deeper understanding of the
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DO N ALD O . P EDER S O N 229
behavior of certain circuit designs. Don became convinced
that the computer would play a necessary role in the design
and analysis of integrated electronics.
A decade of research, involving many undergraduate and
graduate students, eventually produced the integrated circuit
computer simulation program called SPICE (Simulation
Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis). The program
allows engineers to analyze and design complex electronic
circuitry with speed and accuracy. Virtually every electronic
chip, developed anywhere in the world today, uses SPICE or
one of its derivatives at critical stages during its design. Don
and his students made many other contributions to electronic
design automation along the way as well, in areas from
device modeling, mixed-mode simulation, rule-based circuit
diagnosis, to macromodels.
SPICE was one of the first significant open-source computer
programs. The policy established by Don was that SPICE was
available free of charge to any chip designer. The only request
he made was that if a bug was found, or a new feature added,
a copy should be sent back to Berkeley so that it could be
made available to all other users. This policy accelerated the
improvement of SPICE and its enhancement with many new
features.
Soon after Don retired, former students and colleagues
made substantial gifts to endow a professorship in his name
and to pay for major renovations on the fifth floor of Cory Hall
in a student area now identified as the “Donald O. Pederson
Center for Electronic Systems Design.”
Don Pederson died on December 25, 2004, at the age of 79, of
complications from Parkinson’s disease. He is survived by his
wife of 27 years, Karen; four children from his first marriage,
to Claire Nunan—son John and daughters Katharine Rookard,
Margaret Stanfield, and Emily Sanders; and four grandsons.
Don was elected to membership in the National Academy
of Engineering in 1974 and to membership in the National
Academy of Sciences in 1982. He garnered numerous other
honors and awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship
in 1968, an American Association for the Advancement of
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230 MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
Science fellowship in 1988, the Berkeley Citation in 1991, the
Phil Kaufman Award from the Electronic Design Automation
Consortium in 1995, and the Medal of Honor from the Institute
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1998. He also received
an honorary doctorate from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in
Belgium.
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