Biographical Memoirs Volume 89 (2007) / Chapter Skim
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DONALD OSCAR PEDERSON
DONALD OSCAR PEDERSON
Pages 284-305
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From page 285... ...
RICHARD NEWTON D ONALD O PEDERSON IS BEST known in the field of elec tronic design automation for leading the development of a groundbreaking program for integrated-circuit computer simulation called SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis)
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From page 286... ...
His enthusiasm for electronics was apparent in his high school physics class, in Fargo, North Dakota, where his family had moved. From that class he was recruited for a weekend job repairing electric motors at the Fargo Electric Motor Co.
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From page 287... ...
"The colonel had to have power for his shaver and the troops had to have power for the movie at night." Pederson returned to the United States and to college in 1946, when he enrolled at North Dakota State University in Fargo. After a day of aptitude tests, a counselor told him that if he wanted to make money, he should forget about college and go to work for a local electric shop, buy into the business, and have a nice life as an electrician.
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From page 288... ...
"I earned my keep," he said. Soon after he started at Bell Labs, he was contacted by a former North Dakota State professor, Harry Dixon, who had become head of the electrical engineering department at the Newark College of Engineering (now the New Jersey Institute of Technology)
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From page 289... ...
cut to come to the university. The idea of teaching was what motivated him." "He always could excite students," recalled Ernie Kuh, a Berkeley professor emeritus, who followed Pederson from Bell Labs to California.
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A few university grants to young faculty and graduate students, along with some money from the Army Research Office and the U.S. Air Force, provided about $300,000 in cash.
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In the middle 1960s Don became interested in the application of computer programs to the analysis of integrated circuits. He and his students had used a Bendix G15 machine (the very one now displayed in the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.)
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From page 292... ...
Bill McCalla, now deceased, made many significant contributions to the CAD industry over the years, including the reworking of the original BIAS program and the integration of nonlinear dc and ac analyses into a single code; Frank Jenkins went on to develop the commercial circuit simulator ASPEC in the late 1970s and some early commercial logic and switch-level simulators, including LOGIS and ILOGS. In the fall of 1969 the young professor Ron Rohrer returned from a leave at Fairchild and began teaching a course designed to apply modern system and circuit-theoretic concepts and advanced numerical methods to circuit analysis and design.
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From page 293... ...
A young graduate student named Larry Nagel had been closely involved in the CANCER project and when his adviser Ron Rohrer left Berkeley, Don took him on as a graduate student on the condition that he could use the CANCER source as a starting point for a truly public-domain, general-purpose circuit simulator. In May 1972 the first version of that new program, SPICE 1, was released from Berkeley.
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From page 294... ...
Within 24 hours Ellis had designed and repunched the cards needed to add automatic machine-code generation to the program -- where SPICE itself generated the native object code needed to solve the sparse-matrix circuit equations for that particular circuit, rather than using the more general code produced by the Fortran compiler. He had debugged and installed the program and, since he managed to get back the factor of two as a result, he was able to keep his dynamic memory management.
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From page 295... ...
The industrial impact of Pederson's early work in electronic design automation is best measured by the use of the technology he and his colleagues developed over a quarter century ago. As mentioned in the introduction, virtually every semiconductor company and the vast majority of electronic system design companies throughout the world use a version of SPICE, or a program derived directly from it.
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From page 296... ...
Brian Preas noted that he had counted 12 textbooks and monographs at the Stanford University student bookstore that contained the word "SPICE" in the title, such as "Integrated Circuit Design Using SPICE." We concur when he says that he cannot think of a significant undergraduate electrical engineering instructional program anywhere in the world today that does not use the SPICE program as an integral part of its curriculum. No other electronic design automation tool or technology has had such a broad educational impact.
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From page 297... ...
However, the original vision of Pederson's SPICE program development team was to put together the best combination of algorithms, to code them in as flexible and portable a style as possible, and to make them freely available. The only restriction placed on users was that they should never charge any third party for the SPICE program itself; Pederson considered it a public-domain resource.
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From page 298... ...
He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering in 1974 and 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 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.
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From page 299... ...
When he and Bob Pepper established the Berkeley Integrated Circuits Lab, they led the world. Many said ICs couldn't be done in university environments.
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His stints as Electronics Research Laboratory Director and Department Chair left Berkeley in superb shape. His skill at assembling a team of outstanding colleagues is evidence by their subsequent roles in the University.
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Pederson, November 16. San Jose, Calif: Electronic Design Automation Consortium.
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From page 302... ...
Nonlinear analysis of a transistor harmonic oscil lator. Proceedings National Electronics Conference 15:536-545.
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SPICE-A simulator program with integrated circuit emphasis. 16th Midwest Symposium on Circuit Theory Paper VI 1.
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Efficient transient simulation of Lossy interconnect. Proceedings 28th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, pp.
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