Breakfast Bytes Blogs

Cadence has a long history of involvement with academia, going all the way back to the founding of SDA and the involvement of Alberto. In EDA, he's like Madonna and only needs a first name, partially because his real name is so long and his title longer still: Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli is the Edgar L. and Harold H. Buttner Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. I've known Alberto since the last time I worked at Cadence at the end of the 1990s. In addition to being on the (real) board of Cadence he was also on the Technology Advisory Board, or TAB, that I had responsibility for running.

Alberto is still on the board of Cadence, although we no longer have a TAB for him to be on, but we have a number of endowments and programs with major universities. If you want to read Alberto's story, going back to his childhood in Italy, see my post Alberto and the Origins of the EDA Industry.

The First PhD Computer Science Schools

There's a story going all the way back to 1962 when "Lick" Licklider picked Stanford, MIT, CMU, and UC Berkeley to be the first place in the US to have PhD programs in computer science. There is a lot of path dependence in the world, and these are still the top universities in the US for Computer Science. For the whole story, see my post "Lick" Licklider, Unsung Hero of US Computer Science.

Cadence has sponsorships of some sort with all four of these universities (and more) starting in 2014. As we put it in a press release back then:

Cadence established the Cadence Design Systems Professorship Fund in May 2014, and the professorship is awarded to those at the top of their academic field who have made a significant contribution to the development of computer systems. This is part of Cadence's overall commitment to advancing education and fostering innovation in the field of computer system design.

Stanford

Stanford University is in Palo Alto, California. Officially it is actually Leland Stanford Junior University. It was founded in 1885.

Kunle Olukotun is the Cadence Design Systems Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford. I happened to sit next to him at an event in the Cadence auditorium (I like to sit at the front so I can take pictures of the speakers) and was surprised that he had an English accent (like all the best people!). He spent part of his youth growing up in England.

He works in the area of multicore processors and parallelism. He currently directs the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab (PPL), which seeks to proliferate the use of heterogeneous parallelism in all application areas using Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs).

Berkeley

Berkeley is obviously in Berkeley, which is on the other side of the bay from San Francisco. It is actually The University of California at Berkeley, or more affectionately just "Cal". It was founded in Oakland in 1868 as just plain "University of California" (hence "Cal") and moved to its present location a few years later.

Kameshwar Poolla is the Cadence Distinguished Professorship in the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley. His focus is more on mechanical engineering, with a special interest in 

• Control, Intelligent Systems, and Robotics (CIR), System identification
• Design, Modeling and Analysis (DMA), Design for Manufacturability
• Physical Electronics (PHY), Semiconductor Manufacturing

CMU

CMU is, of course, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I always have to check when I write the name of that city since there is one East of Silicon Valley which is Pittsburg, and I can never remember which. is which. I went there for the first time in about 1984 when VLSI Technology started a college recruitment program. I got sent there in the depths of winter (it was cold!) to sit in a conference room interviewing seniors, and I succeeded! One of the students I interviewed ended up joining VLSI.

Cadence and Lip-Bu Tan (our CEO for a few more days) gave CMU $6M to support two professorships in computer science, electrical engineering, and computer engineering.

Earlier this year, the first recipients were appointed:

• Maria Florina (Nina) Balcan receives the Cadence Design Systems Chair in Computer Science.
• Vyas Sekar receives the Tan Family Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

MIT

MIT is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (not the real Cambridge!) just outside Boston.

Cadence gave a $5 million gift to the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing to advance research and teaching in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, or data analytics.

In July, Aleksander Madry was named the inaugural Cadence Design Systems Professor. He is the Director of the MIT Center for Deployable Machine Learning and a Faculty Co-Lead of the MIT AI Policy Forum.

Oxford

Oxford, founded in 1200 (teaching from 1098), is the second oldest university in the world, pipped at the post by the oldest, the University of Bologna founded in 1180 (teaching from 1088). My alma mater, Cambridge (the real one!) is a decade behind, having been founded only in 1209.

With Oxford, instead of endowing a professorship, we sent them an actual professor. Ziyad Hanna, the Corporate VP of all our formal products, is also a visiting professor at Oxford. We also work closely with them on technology. In fact, the recently announced C2RTL App (see my post Announcing Jasper C2RTL App: Formal for Algorithmic Designs) incorporates jointly developed technology.

I asked him about which are the technical areas in which we cooperate, and he told me:

• RTL data path formal verification where Prof. Tom is a consulting expert to Intel as well
• C/C++ formal verification where we have been in tight collaboration for years and we use their core CBMC capability in the C2RTL App
• I am a consulting member of their new quantum computing initiative – just started
• RISC-V formal verification research using Jasper – Oxford student won Cadence research award

Cadence Academic Network

We have a completely separate program called the Cadence Academic Network. This mostly deals with providing and supporting universities with tools, training courses, and more, including helping students with their careers, whether they decide to stay in academia or move into industry. You can read more about this in my posts:

• Cadence Academic Network Is Ten Years Old
• Cadence in Brazil
• Young People Program at DATE 2021
• Why Millennial Engineers Should Work for Cadence

Plus we have a program for interns, called CHIPS, which you can read about in my posts:

• CHIP: College Hire and Internship Program
• CHIPs: Interns Around the World
• CHIPs in the Cadence Cafeteria

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