One of the best ways to save the planet is to educate people. —Dr. Rob Rutenbar, winner of the Phil Kaufman Award, 2017 The first two years of my career was spent in a room with Rob on a whiteboard, and it was the most fun I have ever had. —Elias Fallon, student of Dr. Rutenbar and Software Engineering Group Director, Cadence This last Thursday I had the opportunity to attend the 2017 Phil Kaufman Award Dinner, presented by the Electronic System Design Alliance (ESDA) and the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA). This year, the award was given to Dr. Rob Rutenbar, Senior Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Pittsburgh. The Phil Kaufman Award honors an individual who has had a demonstrable impact on the field of electronic system design. The nominee should have an impact on any or a combination of the following categories: Business Industry direction and promotion Technology and engineering Educational and mentoring Success in both industry and academia comes as no surprise to those who know Dr. Rutenbar. Tom Beckley, senior vice president of Custom IC and PCB at Cadence, said that “Rob is first and foremost an outstanding teacher, who always puts his students first. His students are not only skilled in EDA, but also in communications, innovation, working as team players, and share Rob’s passion and strong work ethic.” When your life’s work is educating people, you could argue that his work has significantly affected all four categories in electronic system design. A Series of Collisions Dr. Martin Wong, Executive Associate Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, introduced Dr. Rutenbar and highlighted the EDA courses he developed. During his 25 years at CMU, Rob developed a pioneering pair of introductory graduate courses on EDA topics. Initially focused on physical design, he later broadened the course to be an overview of EDA for both logic and layout. Rob moved to the University of Illinois in 2010, a time when many universities were reducing EDA courses. He reworked his CMU course , VLSI CAD: Logic to Layout , into a massive, open online course (MOOC), launched in 2013. To date, the course has connected with over 50,000 registered learners from more than 150 countries. I’d say that teaching over 50K students—while publishing eight books, 175 research articles, and holding 14 US patents—would have an impact on business, industry direction, and technology in general! In his acceptance speech, Dr. Rutenbar described his life as a series of collisions: collisions of interesting people, of analog versus digital, of creative people meeting at the right time and place, collisions with management, and collisions with students. When describing his career, he started with saying he used Introduction to VLSI Systems , also known as Mead & Conway , the “book that changed everything” (as Paul described in The SDE Circle of Life ). “I was there !” he chuckled. While I appreciate that he wants to share the credit with the people and circumstances surrounding him, Dr. Rutenbar’s career seems to have been more than just a series of happenstance. You don’t just accidentally develop a wide range of fundamental models, algorithms, and tools for analog IC designs. It wasn’t a mistake that he co-founded Neolinear, an analog tool company (acquired by Cadence in 2004). In short, this award recognizes that Dr. Rutenbar actively and personally had a significant impact on the industry. Education and EDA As I sat at the award dinner, I found myself chatting with Elias Fallon, a Software Engineering Group Director at Cadence in Pittsburgh, and he regaled me with stories about being Dr. Rutenbar’s student (see header). In trying to articulate how critical the work of education is to this industry, he said he has always wanted to see a graph comparing Moore’s Law and the number of software engineers. You’d think that while the number of transistors increases on a logarithmic scale, so would the number of engineers to design them. But of course that isn’t the case—and that design gap is where EDA happens. Well, Elias, here’s your wish. (I wish I could have found figures for electrical engineers worldwide, but could only find computer science degrees awarded in the U.S. Apologies to engineers outside of the States! But the trend still holds, and even though the numbers might be different, the slope of engineers is relatively flat, as compared with Moore’s Law.) Some have suggested that IP usage has helped make up that design gap, and that is true—but someone has to design the IP, right? So the key to making up that gap is through education. Teaching and Saving the World During Dr. Rutenbar’s retrospective on his career, he made a diversion from his life in EDA. After losing his mother, he was given a piece of advice about grief: channel your sadness in helping others. So he went to El Salvador to do work with the underprivileged there. He showed us a photograph of himself, grinning, surrounded by 5-year-olds: he was an aide to a teacher, serving a community of native people who didn’t even speak Spanish because they all spoke the native language. He talked about the opportunities that these kids may, or more likely, may not have access to. It was in this context that he said, “One of the best ways to save the planet is to educate people.” That hit me more than his EDA successes and business acumen. Dr. Rutenbar is, at heart, an educator, and that is how he has made his mark on the world. And we all have to find our own paths to success—and no one path is the One True Path. If your goal in life is to create cool stuff and solve problems and engineer new solutions, then go for it. Take classes, think creatively, wait for a collision with other like-minded people. If your goal in life is to raise a great set of kids, then by all means, do it. Find a partner (or not), stay involved, raise those kids with good values, never let them question their importance to the universe. If your goal in life is to start a business and make a lot of money, then more power to you. Get your MBA, learn ethics, and figure out more and creative ways to buy low and sell high. If your goal in life is to love and be loved, awesome. Become lovable and the love will return. If your goal in life is some version of “be successful”, then define that goal and do everything you can to get there. And if your goal in life is to save the planet? Educate people. This is what Dr. Rutenbar seems to have learned on the way. If you don’t think you can teach, there are other ways to do it than standing in front of a classroom and lecturing. There are always people out there who want to know what you know, who want to do what you know how to do. Bring to those people who are yearning to be taught the insights, knowledge, and experience that you have picked up on the way, and in doing so, you end up saving the world. I think Dr. Rutenbar is on the right track. And congratulations on receiving the Phil Kaufman Award for 2017! —Meera![]()
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