Figure-Skating Champion Wins Kaufman Award

I never went to journalism school, but people get taught to open biographical articles with some anecdote to hook the reader's attention. Such as our subject got kicked out of school in 3rd grade. Or he was the Eastern US figure skating champion. Or every fall he goes to Hudson's Bay to photograph polar bears. I mean that sounds more interesting than basically inventing scan test.

Well, Tom Williams did all those things. He is this year's recipient of the Kaufman Award, at least under his official persona as Dr Thomas W. Williams, He spent 30 years at IBM and then 12 years at Synopsys, before he retired.

He is on vacation in Italy right now, before he will go and rent a boat and sail out of Villefranche-Sur-Mer. He was a little surprised I knew where it was, but I'd lived in the South of France for nearly 6 years, on the other side of Nice. If you are into rock music history, Villefranche is also where, in 1971, the Rolling Stones rented a villa and recorded Exile on Main Street in the cellar. Tom spent a fair bit of time himself in the south of France, since IBM has a big office at La Gaude in the hills above Nice Airport. Anyway, I talked to him in Italy last week.

Rochester

He grew up in Rochester New York, which you may know was the headquarters of Eastman Kodak. Tom said he's loved photography since he was a boy, so I guess maybe there is something in the water there. The other thing that you might now about Rochester is that winter is a major thing, with 120" of snow most winters. Tom told me that he is old enough to remember when they used horse-drawn wooden snowplows to clear the sidewalks.

Unusually, for someone who ended up with a PhD and a career in technology, Tom hated school and, as he put it, "I wasn't very good at it". He was kicked out in 3rd grade and his parents had a hard time getting him back in since the principal considered him to be "retarded". But a number of people, including his parents, saw something and went out of their way to help him, despite his terrible grades. As Tom told me, the school "considered I should have been a garbage collector."

Another thing that happened was that he got into ice-skating. He thinks it was partially a way his father figured to keep him out of trouble. One day a pro coaching a girl saw him skate and asked if he'd like to compete. Tom said that wasn't happening since his parents had little money, being first and second generation immigrants from Eastern Europe. But the girl's father was a rich lawyer and said not to worry about that. So he started to get professional training and he and the girl, Cindy Webster, became Eastern US champions in figure-skating. However, he was doing so badly in school with four Fs and a D ("I was good at math") and so in the junior year of high school, he had to quit since it was just taking too much time. Maybe he was lucky:

It was probably a good thing. I had a good chance to make the US team. But the entire US team was killed that year in 1961 flying to the world championships. I'd actually seen them compete just a few days before.

His grades at high school were so poor he could only manage to get into a school in Missouri since it seemed to just want someone from somewhere different. But he had terrible hay fever and so came back after a few weeks. Somehow, his mother managed to get him into Clarkson as an undergraduate, so he ended up back in New York in Potsdam. He survived being an undergraduate and at the end a professor asked him if he'd like to do some work in plasma physics for the summer. So he did that and then went off to do a masters in mathematics at SUNY Binghamton. He says it was the:

best thing that ever happened to me. I thought I was an applied guy, but this was all abstract mathematics, a different world. They didn't just want you to know 2+2=4 they wanted you to prove it. I ended up writing the most well-read masters dissertation Embedding a Ring into a Ring with Identity.

IBM

The professor he'd worked with was moving to Colorado and suggested Tom come and do a PhD. Tom had worked as an intern at IBM one summer, and did it again the following summer. But he missed some cutoff date for Colorado, and IBM's HR organization refused to extend his time as an intern. So his boss solved that problem by hiring him.full-time, before sending him off to do his PhD. "Come back in 3 years."

He got his PhD, came back to IBM, and stayed for 30 years. He met Ed Eichelberger, who had the idea of having a race-free design in his PhD. Ed put the IBM scan concept together and wanted to build a group to get these ideas implemented in IBM. Tom was the first to join Ed in this effort and then managed the group for nearly a decade.Together they wrote a paper for the 1977 Design Automation Conference innocously titled A Logic Design Structure for LSI Testability. This described level-sensitive scan design LSSD, which separated test and system clocks, and had a separate test mode. Pretty much all digital logic today is tested using methods derived from that original 40-year old paper.

Tom moved to Colorado, because, as he put it, "Fort Collins has 315 days of sunshine and Endicott gets the rest." He spent a large part of the time initially convincing IBM to use scan, which was "an uphill struggle." I find that amusing, since to the rest of the industry, I think IBM is perceived as a pioneer in scan.

Synopsys

A couple of times, Tom went to be a Robert Bosch visiting fellow in Germany. After the second time, in 1997, he was just coming up to his 30th year at IBM and decided it was time for a change. So he contacted Raúl Camposano, who was CTO of Synopsys, and Antun Domic who worked for him. Antun brought him on to help lead their strategy in test and synthesis.

Rohit Kapur who had worked for Tom at IBM from the time he received his PhD was by then at Synopsys when Tom arrived. Tom asked for Rohit to work with him and "it was just great." It was one of those partnerships that lasted for years at two companies. At Synopsys, Tom was key in the development of their test compression, another important aspect of scan test that made it practical as SoCs got larger and larger and test time was starting to be an embarrassingly large part of overall manufacturing cost. For an introduction to test compression, see my post Modus—Tests Great, Less Filling. This is not a product Tom worked on (he never worked for Cadence), but the post covers the overall concept.

Kaufman Award

Of course, Tom couldn't have done all this without the support of his wife, Candace Merrill-Williams, and his children. At a commencement speech that Tom gave at his alma mater in Colorado, he pointed out to the students that for every one of them there were probably three or four more who were just as good but didn't make it through the system. Given his terrible academic record up until university, he feels he could easily have been one of them. But his philosophy is that those of us who made it through also need to pay attention to young people and do what it takes to nurture and encourage them.

Here is the press release announcing Tom being honored with the award. The Kaufman Award dinner is on Wednesday, November 7th at the GlassHouse in San Jose. Here are full details including reservations. I can pretty much promise you some photos of Tom figure skating in his youth. I'd show you some here, except Tom has already sent them for presentation during the dinner, so he felt he'd better not give them to me, too.

For more of Tom's photos, see his photo website.

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