Donald O. Pederson

Biography

Donald Pederson was born on 30 September 1925 in Hallock, Minnesota. He received a B.S. from North Dakota State University in 1948 and both an M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1949 and 1951, all in Electrical Engineering.

In 1955 he joined the University of California at Berkeley, where he is now Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Throughout his 50-year teaching and research career - more than half of it at the University of California at Berkeley -Pederson has concentrated on the design and performance of electronic circuits. His work on circuits began with those using vacuum tubes as the active devices, then transistors and finally large-scale integrated circuits, with special attention to new and improved design technologies.

The development of SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuits Emphasis) was a major achievement in combining software engineering, numerical analysis and modeling of transistors for integrated circuit implementation. For more than 25 years SPICE has been the standard means of simulating circuits at the transistor level.

Pederson ' s research efforts have been reported in more than 100 technical publications, while his teaching has influenced countless graduate students. Before his retirement in 1991, he was the inaugural E.L. and H.H. Buttner Professor of Electrical Engineering.

Pederson was elected a Berkeley Fellow in 1995. He has an honorary Ph.D. from the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium and was a Fulbright Lecturer in Ireland.

Named a Fellow of the IEEE in 1964 and a Life Fellow in 1991, he received the IEEE Education Medal in 1969, the IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984 and the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Council's Outstanding Development Award in 1985. He was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1998, "For creation of the SPICE Program, universally used for the computer aided design of circuits."

Pederson is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Industry has recognized his achievements as well, honoring him with the Semiconductor Industry Association's inaugural University Research Award, the Phil Kaufman Award from the Electrical Design Automation Companies and, as co-recipient, the 1996 Computer & Communication Promotion Prize.