2022 Kaufman Award Honors Giovanni De Micheli

This year's Kaufman Award honors Giovanni De Micheli, usually known as Nanni. Of course, with a name like that, you will guess correctly that he is Italian. However, despite being brought up in Italy, his career has spanned two main parts, neither of them in Italy: in the U.S. for 25 years, and in Switzerland for 14 years and counting.

The text from the official press release details Nanni's contributions:

Dr. De Micheli was recognized for his extensive contributions to electronic design automation (EDA). His EDA tools and methodologies research has helped drive significant advances in the academic field of design automation and made a lasting impact on the industry through their incorporation into commercial EDA solutions. Notably, he developed multiple technologies while inspiring his students, university researchers and engineers in the industry. His work has expanded the fields of high-level synthesis, logic synthesis, and network-on-chip (NoC) for more than 30 years.

Italy

Nanni was brought up in Milan and attended Politecnico di Milano where he studied nuclear engineering. He fully intended to become a nuclear engineer and usher in wider user of nuclear power, but by the time he graduated, Three Mile Island had happened, and the direction of the power industry moved away from nuclear. He had always been fascinated by the physical aspect of things and decided that electronics contained enough physics, so he made that switch.

America

He moved to the U.S. to do a Master's Degree at UC Berkeley, followed by a PhD. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli was his thesis advisor, with Richard Newton (who unfortunately died very prematurely in 2007 at the age of only 55) as a co-advisor.

I learned a lot from them

He was surprised that there were many Italian students at Berkeley working for Olivetti, and commuting back and forth between California and Ivrea, the small town where Olivetti's semiconductor work was based, which I visited a couple of times since it had a strategic agreement with VLSI Technology (and was famous for the main hotel in town looking like a typewriter—Olivetti was big in typewriters before it got into computers). Of course, Alberto himself was Italian, and also had studied at Politecnico di Milano and was a professor there for a time.

Nanni told me that he made what was probably a big financial mistake. When Jim Solomon was forming Solomon Design Automation (SDA), the company that became Cadence, he tried to recruit Nanni. This was so early that SDA didn't even have an office yet, so he would have been employee number four or five if he had joined. But he was more oriented toward research and academia so he declined.

Instead, he decided to go to "Watson", IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. You can read about last year's Kaufman Award honoree's experience at the same laboratory in my post The 2022 Kaufman Dinner. That honoree was Anirudh Devgan, Cadence's CEO. Nanni's motivation for going to Watson was to work with Bob Brayton and Raoul Camposano on the Yorktown Silicon Compiler. This took in RTL and generated layout in the then state-of-the-art 1um technology (or 1,000nm in today's technology, if we are not onto 10,000Å yet).

But Nanni really wanted to be an academic, not a researcher in industry, so when an opportunity arose to go to Stanford, he applied and got the job.

He stayed at Stanford for 18 years. As he told me:

It's hard to complain about Stanford: great campus, great students, great colleagues, and you are in the middle of Silicon Valley...plus it was a golden time for semiconductors and EDA.

I met him during his time at Stanford. When I was VP of Engineering at Ambit Design Systems (subsequently acquired by Cadence), we had a Technology Advisory Board (TAB) and he was one of the members. I forget whether we recruited any of his students. While I wouldn't want to underestimate advice from the TAB members themselves, I'm a firm believer that the best way to move technology is in people's heads, so the real purpose of a TAB is to recruit the best students from the professors on the board.

Japan

For six months in 1992 (wow, thirty years ago), Nanni went to Kyoto in Japan along with two students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, doing research together at Panasonic. Jerry (who is Chinese-American) met his Japanese wife there. But it also exposed them to a different culture. You may not recognize Jerry and David's names today, but they went on to found Yahoo! in 1994, less than two years later. They became two of the internet's first billionaires. Nanni couldn't find his picture of the three of them in Kyoto, so you'll have to make do with him making sake.

Switzerland

After 25 years at Stanford, he was ready for a change, and when the opportunity came up to move to Switzerland, he took it. He moved to EPFL, the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, or the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne for the non-francophone.

He worked on a couple of main areas. The first was the usual interaction between technology and EDA developing silicon nanowires, carbon nanotubes, and majority-logic primitives. With majority logic, they proved they could get improvements of 15%, which is large.

The second area was a major European program to apply CS and EE to help the environment. Twenty years ago, people were not building sensors integrated or co-packaged with silicon, but now you can combine electronics and sensing to measure the purity of water, pollutants, air quality, and so on.

And what better environment is there than the side of Mont Blanc (or Monte Bianco as it is known in Italy)? Here Nanni is on the snow that makes Mont Blanc blanc (white) all year round.

Or, for good water quality, how about Svalbard, between Norway and the North Pole? Now that's North!

Dinner

There will be a Kaufman Dinner where the Kaufman Award will officially be bestowed, along with many of Nanni's colleagues over the years presenting. However, the date has not been finalized yet.

UPDATE: From ESD Alliance "Mark your calendars for Thursday, Feb. 23, 2023!"

Mark Templeton

The Phil Kaufman Hall of Fame was founded in 2021 to honor deceased members of the semiconductor design industry, who are ineligible to receive the Phil Kaufman Award, a policy set by the IEEE. Unlike the Kaufman Award, there can be no inductees in any given year or more than one. This year, Mark Templeton, the former managing director of investment firm Scientific Ventures and a Lanza techVentures investment partner and board member, today was inducted posthumously into the Phil Kaufman Hall of Fame. I think he is most famous for being one of the founders of Artisan Components (now part of Arm), and so one of the people at the very beginning of what today we call "IP" (but back then just called libraries).

Mark passed away in 2016 at the age of 57.

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