Breakfast Bytes Blogs

On May 12th, it was the Kaufman Award Ceremony and Banquet at which Cadence's CEO Anirudh Devgan was awarded the 2021 Phil Kaufman Award. Yes, I know it is 2022. Normally the award dinner is held late in the year, but for Covid-reasons, it was postponed first until March and then until May. But it took place and was in-person in the Glasshouse in downtown San Jose. I met a lot of people face-to-face who I had not seen for over two years. If the ESD Alliance CEO Outlook Panel had not taken place recently (see my post ESD Alliance CEO Outlook 2022) then it would be many more, but a good cross-section of the EDA and IP industries were present at both events. By the way, the 2020 Kaufman Award was not...er...awarded

KT Moore, Cadence's VP Corporate Marketing (so I'm in his organization), was the Master of Ceremonies. We drank wine and ate hors d'oeuvres for an hour before sitting down to dinner. The actual ceremony began while we were eating, so while I got to enjoy my salad, much of my halibut went to waste since I was busy typing and photographing. The sacrifices that I have to make for my readers!

Lip-Bu Tan

First up was Lip-Bu Tan, until last December Cadence's CEO before Anirudh took over. He told the story of recruiting Anirudh to join Cadence and then persuading him to move from Texas to California. "Sorry, but you'll have to pay more tax."

Ron Rohrer

The first person to speak (after we got the standard pitches for the ESD Aliiance and for CEDA, the two organizations that sponsor the award) was Ron Rohrer. He was Anirudh's Ph.D. supervisor at Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) starting in 1989. For Anirudh's own perspective on arriving in the US in the middle of winter to go to CMU, see my post Anirudh Recognized with the 2021 Phil Kaufman Award. Anirudh's Ph.D. was on ultra-fast circuit simulation. In fact, Anirudh sort of parallelized SPICE, something that Ron considered was impossible. I believe that even today, some of the ideas in that thesis show up in products like Voltus and Clarity.

After graduating, Anirudh went to "Watson," long name the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he continued to work on numerical simulation under the name ACES (Adaptively Controlled Explicit Simulation). If you want to dive deep, there is an IEEE paper Efficient simulation of interconnect and mixed analog-digital circuits in ACES by one A. Devgan and R. Rohrer.

Later, Anirudh told Ron that "I'm going to go into management." He learned entrepreneurship at Magma and then management at Cadence.

Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli 

Alberto opened with a "where's Waldo" pic (trivia facto the day: he is called Wally in the UK where the series originated). That is Anirudh's high school, Delhi Public School (like in the UK, "public school" means "private school", the word "public" distinguishing it from religious schools which were not open to just any member of the public). One of the people in that picture is Anirudh (and another is his future wife, Richa).

As an undergraduate, Anirudh went to IIT Delhi and somehow Alberto had managed to get a photograph of him when he graduated. As Ron already related earlier, next Anirudh came to the US and went to CMU to do postgraduate work.

At CMU, he worked on advanced numerical simulation algorithms and received his Ph.D.

His first job after graduating was at Watson, as I already said above, where he continued to work on ACES. After a time, he felt that he had learned everything he would at IBM, and wanted to see if he could extend it into a startup. He met with Rajeev Madhavan (the CEO of Magma) and decided to take a job there.

He started to present to customers for the first time in his life. He went to Texas instruments (TI) to push for them to adopt FineSim (the product he was working on). TI already had TISpice. As Alberto put it:

He goes in and says, by the way, I can do this much better than TISpice, and I can parallelize everything. Even after many years, he has not disclosed his secret. Something crazy!

Magma was acquired by Synopsys. Lip-Bu Tan invited Anirudh to dinner, and the rest is history. Ron Rohrer told Alberto that Anirudh was his best student ever and he should meet him, but in fact Alberto only met him when he had already joined Cadence.

Alberto relayed a story from John Wall, today Cadence's CFO:

We worked together on the financial model for the company as far back as 2017. I always use 2016 as our baseline for comparison of our annual results because I became CFO in 2017 and immediately partnered with Anirudh on the Annual Operating Plan. So, 2017 was our first year together...2017 was 1 AD, so that means 2022 is 6 AD...six years after Devgan!

The Award Awarded

Anirudh

With the award replaced in his hand by a microphone, it was time for Anirudh to speak.

I grew up on campus. My parents never said anything but a Ph.D. was minimum qualification. My Dad who is 85 now was a well-known mathematics professor. I went to Delhi Public School where (like in the UK) “public means private.”

In undergrad I had to write a paper and it was on neural networks, a bit ahead of the right moment. I had to choose between Stanford and CMU, and my undergrad advisor said, “Ron Rohrer” you have to go to CMU.

Ron had ideas all the time and he was so famous. Even when I joined, he didn’t want to keep students too long either. “If you do the work, he will let you graduate,” I was told. One bit of advice: go to work with a senior famous professor.

I didn’t want to be a professor, but I also didn’t want to go into industry, so I chose the middle ground of IBM Yorktown. Then I moved to Austin, still with IBM.

I left IBM to go to Magma. And now Cadence. It has been a “great journey.” I stand on the shoulders of giants. Today we have computer science plus mathematics plus computational software that can be applied to many things.

Thank you very much.

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Group photo: Alberto, LBT, Anirudh, Chin-Chi, John Wall...and front-and-center the Kaufman Award 2021.

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