Every year one person in EDA is honored with the Phil Kaufman Award. As it says on the EDAC website : Presented by the Electronic Design Automation Consortium and the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation, this award honors an individual who has had demonstrable IMPACT on electronic design through contributions in the field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA). Later this month, on November 12, is the Phil Kaufman Award Dinner, where the award is formally presented. But it is not like the Oscars where an envelope is opened to find out who it is, it is all announced in advance. This year’s honoree is Wally Rhines, the CEO of Mentor. I talked to him last week, look for that blog tomorrow. But who was Phil Kaufman? Although we both joined the EDA industry in 1982, I never knew him personally, so I called up Rick Carlson who worked with him back in those early days of EDA. Phil Kaufman was a design manager working at Intel but he left Intel in 1982 to be CEO of Silicon Compilers (SCI). Later, after its merger with SDL, the company was known as Silicon Compiler Systems (SCS) and, eventually, was acquired by Mentor in 1990. But by then Phil had moved on to join Quickturn where he became CEO. Quickturn was one of the earliest companies building emulators. It was acquired in 1998 by Cadence (I remember it well since it was a couple of months after I joined Cadence through the Ambit acquisition). Cadence’s current emulation product line is a great-great grandchild of those original Quickturn emulators. In those days, they were called Cobalt, which I believe actually stood for something, but also started the trend to name the emulators after chemical elements. Cobalt was followed by Mercury and today’s Palladium. The next thing that Phil got involved with was the creation of EDAC. Rick told me a bit about it. In fact, it was initially called IDAC since it was meant to be a consortium to group the small EDA companies (the I stood for independent) so that they could work together to create a reference flow to compete against the bigger companies, who in that era were Daisy, Mentor, and Cadence. Rick and Dave Millman decided to bring the small companies together in the late '80s. However, soon they realized it was more important to bring in the entire industry and grow the market and foster innovation. Rick called Joe Costello, then the CEO of Cadence, who was in Japan at the time, and got him on board. Phil Kaufman was another of the individuals heavily involved in getting EDAC off the ground. But Phil died unexpectedly from a heart attack on a business trip to Japan on July 17, 1992 Another EDA professional, Ron Westergren, who was the VP sales at Quickturn, had also died a few months earlier. The two deaths affected Rick deeply. Rick also felt that EDA needed an award to honor the special people who work in the industry. He persuaded Alan Hanover, then CEO of Viewlogic but more importantly one of the EDAC board members, that we needed such an award. Alan drove EDAC to create the award and to do so in memory of Phil Kaufman. EDAC and the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) sponsored, and still sponsor, the award. It was first presented in 1994. Wally Rhines has another connection to the award, other than receiving it. For the first 10 years he chaired the committee that decided who should receive the award (Aart has chaired it since then). Another person who was heavily involved from the start until his untimely death was Richard Newton, who had a deep technical understanding of the "who really made the what" contributions and also made sure that the award did not get hijacked by the provincial needs of the EDA companies. The first recipient of the Phil Kaufman Award was Hermann Gummel, who made many contributions including the integral charge control model for bipolar junction transistors that half bears his name, the Gummel-Poon model. Cadence fellow Grant Martin was proud to point out to me a certificate he has on his office wall for a training course signed by Poon, but it was lost on me. I came to electronics in the MOS era and all I know about bipolar transistors are that there is a base, collector, and emitter. I think the base is sort of gate-like but mostly because collector and emitter sound a bit like source and drain. Gummel also developed one of the first graphical editors, GRED, an ancestor of Calma GDS and a distant ancestor of the Virtuoso Layout Suite and other competing products. In a couple of weeks is the Phil Kaufman Award dinner, where Dr Walden C. Rhines will formally be presented with the award. It seems weird to use his formal name like that since he is universally known as Wally throughout the industry. The dinner is at 6.30pm on November 12 at the 4 th Street Summit Center in San Jose. Full details including registration are on the EDAC website .![]()
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