James E. Solomon | |
---|---|
Born | 1936 Boise, Idaho |
Education | BSEE and MSEE, UC Berkeley |
Occupation | Entrepreneur, engineer |
James E. Solomon (born 1936 in Boise, Idaho) is an American engineer and entrepreneur. In his lifetime, he has founded four companies, including one of the companies that merged to form the leading chip manufacturing toolmaker Cadence Design Systems. He is an IEEE Fellow and received the industry's Phil Kaufman Award in 1997. Solomon holds 23 patents in integrated chip design. [1]
Solomon graduated with BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. [2]
He began his career with Maconomy, spending three years designing radar devices and components for missile control systems. [2] The next seven years, he ran linear integrated circuit design at the Motorola Semiconductor Lab. After his time with Motorola, he moved to National Semiconductor from 1970–1983, where he was director of IC design for analog and mixed-signal chips. [1]
In 1983 Solomon founded his first company, Solomon Design Automation (SDA Systems), which eventually merged with ECAD to become Cadence Design Systems . Near the end of his time with CDS, he co-founded Smart Machines (in 1994), a company that manufactures direct-drive robots for semiconductor wafer manufacture. The company was acquired in 1999 by Brooks Automation. In 1995, he co-founded Xulu Entertainment, a computer based entertainment venture. [3] In 2001, Solomon unveiled plans for a 20,000-square-foot (1,900 m2) entertainment center to be named Xulu Universe , which would combine a restaurant/lounge with a simulator of an alien world. According to Solomon, Xulu had invested over $12 million in the project, having hired design and engineering staff from companies such as Lucasfilm and Disney. [4]
Solomon was the 1997 recipient of the Phil Kaufman Award "for his innovative contributions to design tool technology of benefit to electronic systems and IC designers". [5]
Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company was divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011. Motorola Solutions is generally considered to be the direct successor to Motorola, Inc., as the reorganization was structured with Motorola Mobility being spun off. Motorola Mobility was acquired by Lenovo in 2014.
Very large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions of MOS transistors onto a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when MOS integrated circuit chips were widely adopted, enabling complex semiconductor and telecommunication technologies to be developed. The microprocessor and memory chips are VLSI devices. Before the introduction of VLSI technology, most ICs had a limited set of functions they could perform. An electronic circuit might consist of a CPU, ROM, RAM and other glue logic. VLSI lets IC designers add all of these into one chip.
Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), is a category of software tools for designing electronic systems such as integrated circuits and printed circuit boards. The tools work together in a design flow that chip designers use to design and analyze entire semiconductor chips. Since a modern semiconductor chip can have billions of components, EDA tools are essential for their design; this article in particular describes EDA specifically with respect to integrated circuits (ICs).
Synopsys is an American electronic design automation company that focuses on silicon design and verification, silicon intellectual property and software security and quality. Products include logic synthesis, behavioral synthesis, place and route, static timing analysis, formal verification, hardware description language simulators, and transistor-level circuit simulation. The simulators include development and debugging environments that assist in the design of the logic for chips and computer systems. In recent years, Synopsys has expanded its products and services to include application security testing. Their technology is present in self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, and internet of things consumer products.
Daisy Systems Corporation, incorporated in 1981 in Mountain View, California, was a computer-aided engineering company, a pioneer in the electronic design automation (EDA) industry.
Phil Kaufman Award was established by the EDA Consortium to recognize individuals for their impact on electronic design by their contributions to electronic design automation (EDA). It has been dubbed "The Nobel Prize of the EDA Industry".
Hermann K. Gummel is a pioneer in the semiconductor industry.
In electronics engineering, a design rule is a geometric constraint imposed on circuit board, semiconductor device, and integrated circuit (IC) designers to ensure their designs function properly, reliably, and can be produced with acceptable yield. Design rules for production are developed by process engineers based on the capability of their processes to realize design intent. Electronic design automation is used extensively to ensure that designers do not violate design rules; a process called design rule checking (DRC). DRC is a major step during physical verification signoff on the design, which also involves LVS checks, XOR checks, ERC, and antenna checks. The importance of design rules and DRC is greatest for ICs, which have micro- or nano-scale geometries; for advanced processes, some fabs also insist upon the use of more restricted rules to improve yield.
Silicon Glen is a nickname for the high tech sector of Scotland, the name inspired by Silicon Valley in California. It is applied to the Central Belt triangle between Dundee, Inverclyde and Edinburgh, which includes Fife, Glasgow and Stirling; although electronics facilities outside this area may also be included in the term. The term has been in use since the 1980s. It does not technically represent a glen as it covers a much wider area than just one valley.
VLSI Technology, Inc., was a company that designed and manufactured custom and semi-custom integrated circuits (ICs). The company was based in Silicon Valley, with headquarters at 1109 McKay Drive in San Jose. Along with LSI Logic, VLSI Technology defined the leading edge of the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) business, which accelerated the push of powerful embedded systems into affordable products.
Integrated circuit design, or IC design, is a subset of electronics engineering, encompassing the particular logic and circuit design techniques required to design integrated circuits, or ICs. ICs consist of miniaturized electronic components built into an electrical network on a monolithic semiconductor substrate by photolithography.
SigmaTel was an American system-on-a-chip (SoC), electronics and software company headquartered in Austin, Texas, that designed AV media player/recorder SoCs, reference circuit boards, SoC software development kits built around a custom cooperative kernel and all SoC device drivers including USB mass storage and AV decoder DSP, media player/recorder apps, and controller chips for multifunction peripherals. SigmaTel became Austin's largest IPO as of 2003 when it became publicly traded on NASDAQ. The company was driven by a talented mix of electrical and computer engineers plus other professionals with semiconductor industry experience in Silicon Hills, the number two IC design region in the United States, after Silicon Valley.
Phil Moorby is an British engineer and computer scientist. Moorby was born and brought up in Birmingham, England, and studied Mathematics at Southampton University, England. Moorby received his master's degree in computer science from Manchester University, England, in 1974. He moved to the United States in 1983.
Randal E. Bryant is an American computer scientist and academic noted for his research on formally verifying digital hardware and software. Bryant has been a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University since 1984. He served as the Dean of the School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon from 2004 to 2014. Dr. Bryant retired and became a Founders University Professor Emeritus on June 30th, 2020.
Cadence Design Systems, Inc., headquartered in San Jose, California, is an American multinational computational software company, founded in 1988 by the merger of SDA Systems and ECAD, Inc. The company produces software, hardware and silicon structures for designing integrated circuits, systems on chips (SoCs) and printed circuit boards.
Alberto Luigi Sangiovanni-Vincentelli is an academic researcher, teacher, entrepreneur, technical advisor and business man. He is a co-founder of two companies in the Electronic design automation (EDA) space: Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys, Inc.
Joseph Ball Costello is an American executive in the electronic design automation (EDA) industry. He was president and COO of SDA Systems from 1987–1988 and CEO of Cadence Design Systems, which became the largest EDA company under his tenure, from 1988–1997.
IC Manage is a company that provides design data and IP management, Big Data Analytics, Hybrid Cloud Bursting, and High-Performance Computing software to semiconductors, systems, Internet of Things and artificial intelligence IC companies.
Rob A. Rutenbar is an American academic noted for contributions to software tools that automate analog integrated circuit design, and custom hardware platforms for high-performance automatic speech recognition. He is Senior Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Pittsburgh, where he leads the university's strategic and operational vision for research and innovation.
The Electronic System Design Alliance is the international association of companies that provide tools and services for electronic design automation. Until 2016 it was known as the Electronic Design Automation Consortium. In 2018, the ESD Alliance became a SEMI Technology Community.