Jim Hogan and Ed McCluskey Named Honorees of the Phil Kaufman Hall of Fame

In February of this year, the ESD Alliance and IEEE CEDA announced the creation of the Phil Kaufman Hall of Fame. On Monday, they announced that the first two honorees are Jim Hogan and Ed McCluskey. Ed died in 2016 but, Jim died earlier this year, just a few weeks after the award was created.

When the award was created, the motivation was described as:

The Electronic System Design Alliance (ESD Alliance) and the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA), sponsors of the Phil Kaufman Award for Distinguished Contributions to Electronic System Design, today announced the Phil Kaufman Hall of Fame. This new award posthumously recognizes individuals who made significant and noteworthy contributions through creativity, entrepreneurism, and innovation to the electronic system design industry and were not recipients of the Phil Kaufman Award. Deceased members of the community are not eligible to receive the Phil Kaufman Award, a policy set by the IEEE.

“Many individuals made significant contributions to the semiconductor design industry and helped it grow to where it is today, underpinning the entire global semiconductor and electronic products markets,” says Bob Smith, executive director of the ESD Alliance. “Unfortunately, many of these contributors died but should be recognized for their efforts that were instrumental in shaping our community. The Phil Kaufman Hall of Fame is intended to change that.”

Neither Jim nor Ed were recipients of the Kaufman award, but I think both were widely admired in the industry, at least by us old-timers who knew what they had achieved.

If you are old enough to have done hardware design in the days before there was such a thing as EDA, you almost certainly had to learn how to do hand optimization using the Quine-McCluskey Algorithm. In the unlikely event you want to do a deep dive, here is the Wikipedia page. There is an almost direct path from Quine-McCluskey to UC Berkeley's Espresso system that underlay all the early synthesis systems. By the time I met him, he was more focused on semiconductor testing.

Jim worked at National, and when Jim Solomon created SDA, the forerunner of Cadence, Hogan joined him. Jim is such a common name that much of the time everyone called him Hogan. He stayed at Cadence in a variety of positions, including learning how to be a venture capitalist at our Telos subsidiary. He eventually left for the library company Artisan and sold it to Arm (where it has transmogrified into the Arm Physical Library Division). He returned to being a VC and created Vista Ventures. He was one of the few people investing in EDA and related technologies for years.

As it happens, I worked with both of them. Ed was a professor at Stanford and also on the technical advisory board of Ambit Design Systems. Cadence acquired Ambit, and for three years at Cadence, I worked closely with Jim. For some time, both Jim and I reported directly to Ray Bingham, the then-CEO in the "office of strategic technology". With his background in analog at both National and SDA, he was a great help when I later ran what we then called "custom IC".

There are lots of tributes to both Ed and Jim in the press release, which I think largely came from the award nomination documents. I'll just copy a couple of the quotes I think are most important.

Aart de Geus (co-CEO of Synopsys) and also the 2008 Phil Kaufman Award recipient:

We see a great oak tree suddenly fall and immediately feel the void left behind. We have all learned from Ed's work, and today appreciate his significant contributions in making the ‘digital revolution’ not a slogan but a world-changing reality. We appreciate the impact of Ed’s technical contributions collectively and personally. Thank you, Ed!

Joe Costello (who I'm sure you know was CEO of Cadence for many years from when it was first created from SDA and ECAD), and also the 2004 Phil Kaufman Award recipient:

Jim was one of the pillars of the EDA industry. He worked with me and Jim Solomon for over a decade building Cadence to be the leader in the EDA market and creating the mixed-signal analog division that dominates the market to this day. After I left Cadence, Jim carried on for me taking over my role in M&A continuing to build the company’s product strengths.  After leaving Cadence, Jim may have had an even greater impact on EDA. Those were difficult years for small EDA companies and startups. Jim was a board member, advisor, and investor in more EDA companies than any other person in the last 15 years. It is no exaggeration to say that EDA and EDA technology would not be where it is today without Jim’s guiding hand. And despite all of his prodigious accomplishments, Jim remained the most humble, easy-going, likable person in the industry to the very last day.

I agree. For a couple of decades, I have had lunch or dinner with Jim every few months and benefited from his advice. I can't really believe I'll never have dinner with him again. Nor listen to his band at any industry events. He was the soundtrack of the EDA industry too.

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