Ken Kundert

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Kenneth S. Kundert KennethKundert.jpg
Kenneth S. Kundert

Kenneth S. Kundert is an engineer who is most well known for his work in the area of Electronic Design Automation (EDA). He studied electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley under professors Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli and Robert G. Meyer and received his doctorate in 1989. During this time, he created the circuit simulator that eventually became the Advanced Design System from what is now PathWave Design and the Spectre circuit simulator from Cadence Design Systems.

Kundert co-founded Designer's Guide Consulting and created the Designer's Guide Community. From 1989 to 2005 he was a Fellow at Cadence Design Systems during which time he was the principal architect of the Spectre circuit simulation family. As such, he has led the development of Spectre, SpectreHDL, and SpectreRF. He was also the primary developer of Verilog-A [1] and made substantial contributions to both the Verilog-AMS [2] and VHDL-AMS languages. He has written three books on circuit simulation: The Designer's Guide to Verilog-AMS, [3] The Designer's Guide to SPICE and Spectre, [4] and Steady-State Methods for Simulating Analog and Microwave Circuits. [5]

Since 2005, Kundert, along with Henry Chang, has worked to develop the field of analog verification. [6]

More recently Kundert has developed a number of notable open source software packages, [7] including NestedText.

Kundert was elevated to the status of IEEE Fellow in 2007 for contributions to the simulation and modeling of analog, RF, and mixed-signal circuits. [8] In 2022 he, along with Ricardo Telichevesky and Jacob K. White, was awarded the ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation for their paper Efficient steady-state analysis based on matrix-free Krylov-subspace methods. [9]

Related Research Articles

Verilog, standardized as IEEE 1364, is a hardware description language (HDL) used to model electronic systems. It is most commonly used in the design and verification of digital circuits at the register-transfer level of abstraction. It is also used in the verification of analog circuits and mixed-signal circuits, as well as in the design of genetic circuits. In 2009, the Verilog standard was merged into the SystemVerilog standard, creating IEEE Standard 1800-2009. Since then, Verilog has been officially part of the SystemVerilog language. The current version is IEEE standard 1800-2023.

In computer engineering, a hardware description language (HDL) is a specialized computer language used to describe the structure and behavior of electronic circuits, usually to design application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and to program field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

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).

The Phil Kaufman Award for Distinguished Contributions to EDA honors individuals for their impact on electronic design by their contributions to electronic design automation (EDA). It was established in 1994 by the EDA Consortium. The IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) became a co-sponsor of the award. The first Phil Kaufman Award was presented in 1994.

"Verilog HDL originated at Automated Integrated Design Systems in 1985. The company was privately held at that time by Dr. Prabhu Goel, the inventor of the PODEM test generation algorithm. Verilog HDL was designed by Phil Moorby, who was later to become the Chief Designer for Verilog-XL and the first Corporate Fellow at Cadence Design Systems. Gateway Design Automation grew rapidly with the success of Verilog-XL and was finally acquired by Cadence Design Systems, San Jose, CA in 1989."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OrCAD</span> Electronic design automation software

OrCAD Systems Corporation was a software company that made OrCAD, a proprietary software tool suite used primarily for electronic design automation (EDA). The software is used mainly by electronic design engineers and electronic technicians to create electronic schematics, and perform mixed-signal simulation and electronic prints for manufacturing printed circuit boards (PCBs). OrCAD was taken over by Cadence Design Systems in 1999 and was integrated with Cadence Allegro in 2005.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Integrated circuit design</span> Engineering process for electronic hardware

Integrated circuit design, semiconductor design, chip design or IC design, is a sub-field 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.

Verilog-AMS is a derivative of the Verilog hardware description language that includes Analog and Mixed-Signal extensions (AMS) in order to define the behavior of analog and mixed-signal systems. It extends the event-based simulator loops of Verilog/SystemVerilog/VHDL, by a continuous-time simulator, which solves the differential equations in analog-domain. Both domains are coupled: analog events can trigger digital actions and vice versa.

Verilog-A is an industry standard modeling language for analog circuits. It is the continuous-time subset of Verilog-AMS. A few commercial applications may export MEMS designs in Verilog-A format.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cadence Design Systems</span> American multinational computational software company

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. is an American multinational technology and computational software company. Headquartered in San Jose, California, Cadence was formed in 1988 through the merger of SDA Systems and ECAD. Initially specialized in electronic design automation (EDA) software for the semiconductor industry, currently the company makes software and hardware for designing products such as integrated circuits, systems on chips (SoCs), printed circuit boards, and pharmaceutical drugs, also licensing intellectual property for the electronics, aerospace, defense and automotive industries, among others.

Alberto Luigi Sangiovanni-Vincentelli is an Italian-American computer scientist. Since 1976 he has been a professor affiliated with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. While working at UC Berkeley in the 1980s, he co-founded Cadence Design Systems, an EDA company. He currently sits on the board of Cadence Design.

VHDL-AMS is a derivative of the hardware description language VHDL. It includes analog and mixed-signal extensions (AMS) in order to define the behavior of analog and mixed-signal systems.

PathWave Design is a division of Keysight Technologies that was formerly called EEsof. It is a provider of electronic design automation (EDA) software that helps engineers design products such as cellular phones, wireless networks, radar, satellite communications systems, and high-speed digital wireline infrastructure. Applications include electronic system level (ESL), high-speed digital, RF-Mixed signal, device modeling, RF and Microwave design for commercial wireless, aerospace, and defense markets.

AWR Corporation is an electronic design automation (EDA) software company, formerly known as Applied Wave Research, and then acquired by National Instruments

RF microwave CAE CAD is computer-aided design (CAD) using computer technology to aid in the design, modeling, and simulation of an RF or microwave product. It is a visual and symbol-based method of communication whose conventions are particular to RF/microwave engineering.

Spectre is a SPICE-class circuit simulator owned and distributed by the software company Cadence Design Systems. It provides the basic SPICE analyses and component models. It also supports the Verilog-A modeling language. Spectre comes in enhanced versions that also support RF simulation (SpectreRF) and mixed-signal simulation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jacob K. White</span> American electronics engineer and professor

Jacob K. White is the Cecil H. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He researches fast numerical algorithms for simulation, particularly the simulation of circuits. His work on the FASTCAP program for three-dimensional capacitance calculation and FASTHENRY, a program for three-dimensional inductance calculations, is highly cited. He has also done extensive work on steady-state simulation of analog and microwave circuits. White was a significant early contributor to the development of Spectre and SpectreRF.

SpectreRF is an option to the Spectre Circuit Simulator from Cadence Design Systems. It adds a series of analyses that are particularly useful for RF circuits to the basic capabilities of Spectre. SpectreRF was first released in 1996 and was notable for three reasons. First, it was arguably the first RF simulator in that it was the first to be designed for large bipolar and CMOS RF circuits; it used shooting methods as its base algorithm; and it pioneered the use of Krylov subspace methods. The use of shooting methods gave SpectreRF remarkable robustness and the Krylov methods gave it capacity that was roughly 100 times greater than existing simulators at the time. Previously such simulators were designed to simulate very small GaAs integrated circuits and hybrids. These simulators were based on harmonic balance and could reliably simulate circuits with tens of transistors whereas SpectreRF could simulate circuits with thousands of transistors.

Analog verification is a methodology for performing functional verification on analog, mixed-signal and RF integrated circuits and systems on chip. Discussion of analog verification began in 2005 when it started to become recognized that the analog portion of large mixed-signal chips had become so complex that a significant and ever-increasing number of these chips were being designed with functional errors in the analog portion that prevented them from operating correctly.

Toolkit for Interactive Network Analysis (TINA) is a SPICE-based electronics design and training software by DesignSoft of Budapest. Its features include analog, digital, and mixed circuit simulations, and printed circuit board (PCB) design.

References

  1. Verilog-A Language Reference Manual
  2. Verilog-AMS Language Reference Manual
  3. Ken Kundert. The Designer's Guide to Verilog-AMS. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004.
  4. Ken Kundert. The Designer's Guide to SPICE and Spectre. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995.
  5. Kundert, K. S., White. J. K., and Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, A., Steady-state Methods for Simulating Analog and Microwave Circuits, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, 1990.
  6. Henry Chang and Ken Kundert. Verification of Complex Analog and RF IC Designs. Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 95, no. 3, pp. 622-639 , March 2007.
  7. Kundert's GitHub account
  8. IEEE Fellows of 2007 Archived 2012-05-10 at the Wayback Machine
  9. Telichevesky, R.; Kundert, K. S.; White, J. K. (1995). "Efficient steady-state analysis based on matrix-free Krylov-subspace methods". Proc. 32nd ACM IEEE Design Automation Conference, San Francisco. pp. 480–484. doi:10.1145/217474.217574.