Anirudh Recognized with the 2021 Phil Kaufman Award

This morning, the ESD Alliance of SEMI and IEEE CEDA announced that our new CEO, Anirudh Devgan is the recipient of the 2021 Phil Kaufman Award. Since Anirudh became CEO just yesterday, it might seem that Anirudh is receiving the award before he has had a chance to do anything, but he has done a lot in his thirty years in EDA. As Simon Segars, who is the current chairman of the ESD Alliance, said in the press release announcing the award:

I would like to congratulate Anirudh on receiving the 2021 Phil Kaufman award, His contributions in technical innovation have been foundational to bringing the EDA industry into the modern parallel and cloud computing era. Anirudh’s impact on the industry is well-recognized and celebrated with this distinguished honor.

Lip-Bu Tan also congratulated Anirudh. I have to stop my fingers from automatically typing that Lip-Bu is CEO of Cadence. As of yesterday, he is now our Executive Chairman. He also nominated Anirudh for the honor and said:

 Anirudh has a truly rare combination of widely recognized research excellence, exceptional business impact and results, and outstanding leadership in the EDA industry, Anirudh’s overall contributions during his career spanning Carnegie Mellon, IBM, Magma, and Cadence have significantly advanced the industry.

To give a bit more detail, the product that Anirudh is most strongly associated with is Magma's FineSim SPICE (normally just called FineSim). But the real innovation was that FineSim was the industry's first circuit simulator supporting multi-CPU simulations. Under the hood of a circuit simulator, it is all sparse matrix algebra, so the fundamental technology was working out how to distribute very large matrix operations over multiple CPUs, and now huge numbers of CPUs in the cloud. At Cadence, under his leadership, several products have been created that rely on massively parallel architecture, including Innovus, Xcelium, Spectre X, Clarity, Celsius, and the neural network training and inference used for our products that involve deep learning. These all rely on massive distribution of huge matrix operations across tens or hundreds of cores.

In yesterday's post, The Old Order Changeth: Anirudh Becomes Cadence's CEO Today, I shared his official biography.

From Delhi to Silicon Valley, via Pittsburgh, Yorktown Heights, and Austin

I talked to Anirudh to get a bit more color on the early part of his career. Many Indian engineers in Silicon Valley went to one of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), but Anirudh actually grew up on the campus for IIT Delhi. His father was a professor there, and there was campus housing available. He eventually went to IIT Delhi himself, but having a parent who was a professor didn't give him any advantage. You might know that the IITs run competitive examinations, and you need to be in the top 200 or so to study electrical engineering or computer science—two of the most desirable majors.

Anirudh next decided he wanted to do postgraduate study in the US, and as part of that plan he decided to write an academic paper on multiple-valued logic. It was published in an international journal when he was in his 3rd-year as an undergraduate.

In the end, Anirudh ended up at Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) with Ron Rohrer as his supervisor. He got on a plane to the U.S. and he didn't even know that CMU was in Pittsburgh. In those days (it was 1990), you were only allowed to take $750 out of India, so that was all the money he arrived with. One thing Pittsburgh is famous for is cold and snow, and Delhi is...not. In fact, he'd never seen snow before. More to the point, he didn't own a warm jacket. So, he took the bus to a mall and bought a coat for $50 at Burlington Coat Factory, which was quite a big percentage of his $750 life savings. He told me he kept it for years for sentimental reasons, but his wife hated it and eventually threw it out. After a month or so, he started to get his stipend from CMU of $1100/month.

Anirudh got his Masters and PhD in three years, probably one of the fastest PhDs around. He decided he didn't want to go into academia because it was too close to his Dad’s world, but he didn't really want to go straight to industry either. Therefore, he went to IBM Research in Yorktown Heights. In those days, there were lots of famous people there, including five Nobel prize winners. Eventually, he decided to move out of research and into product and relocated to IBM Austin. He was at IBM for 11 years before he moved on to join Magma Design Automation. He ran Magma's custom design group for seven years before joining Cadence in 2012. He stayed in Austin working for Cadence until 2018 when he moved to the Bay Area.

And yesterday he became Cadence's CEO.

And today he was named the 2021 honoree of the Phil Kaufman Award. The award will actually be presented in 2022 at...

The Kaufman Award Dinner

The award ceremony and dinner for Anirudh will be held Thursday, March 10th (my birthday!), from 6:30 p.m. until 9:30 p.m. at The GlassHouse, which is located at 2 South Market Street, San Jose, California. PSA from me: It will almost certainly run later than 9.30 p.m. It always does!

By the way, if you are racking your brains trying to remember who received the award last year, the answer is nobody. For pandemic-related reasons, it was not awarded. The process for the 2022 award has already begun, and nominations are now being accepted (the deadline is June 30th 2022). Assuming nothing disrupts the "normal" schedule, the honoree should be announced in about September with the Award Dinner in November.

For details of the Kaufman award, including a bit of history, forms for nominations, and past recipients, see the Kaufman Award page on the ESD Alliance website. You can also read my 2015 Breakfast Bytes post The Phil Kaufman Award Dinner Is Later this Month. Who Was Phil Kaufman?

Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.

.