Dr. Robert K. Brayton, Cadence Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, has been chosen as this year's recipient of the Phil Kaufman Award for Distinguished Contributions to Electronic Design Automation (EDA). Dr. Brayton's seminal contributions to logic synthesis have been critical to the design of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and the development of CAD products that use logic synthesis software. Additionally, he co-developed the Sparse Tableau Approach and the Backward Differentiation Formulas. Their implementation as early Circuit Simulation software influenced SPICE, HSPICE and Spectre.
From 1961-1987, Dr. Brayton was employed with the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where he and his colleagues worked on the Yorktown Silicon Compiler that led to combining synthesis and place and route techniques. A professor at the University of California at Berkeley since 1987, Dr. Brayton is an IEEE Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Brayton has received the IEEE Circuits and Systems Technical Achievement Award, the Circuits and Systems Golden Jubilee Award, the IEEE Millennium Medal and the Emanuel R. Piore Award. He received the Iowa State University Marston Medal, the 2006 European Design Automation Society lifetime achievement award and the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award. He has published 10 books and more than 450 papers. Dr. Brayton earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
The Kaufman Award
Presented annually since 1994, the award honors an individual who has had a demonstrable impact on the field of EDA. It was established in honor of deceased EDA industry pioneer Phil Kaufman, who turned innovative technologies such as silicon compilation and emulation into businesses that have benefited electronic designers.
