Robert W. Dutton

Biography

The development of modern IC technology would not have been possible without the software tools, physical models, and software methodologies pioneered by Robert Dutton. After joining the Stanford faculty in the 1970s, inspired by early efforts in circuit simulation, he began to explore the possibility of providing similar capabilities to support the design of the underlying process technologies. IC technology development was a purely experimental process at that time. Nevertheless, Dutton persevered, and his research ultimately led to the process simulation program SUPREM. For the work he did with his students and colleagues over the next several decades, Dutton has rightly been called “the father of TCAD.” Hundreds of papers were published by Dutton’s students and colleagues around the world who helped build the scientific knowledge on which process models came to be based. These increasingly sophisticated models were implemented in software using advanced algorithms and publicly released by Dutton’s group as SUPREM (I, II, III, and IV) starting in the late 1970s. They immediately became useful in universities as teaching tools and in industry to help develop new technology generations. With the development of SUPREM III in 1979, Dutton co-founded Technology Modeling Associates (TMA), which was the first company to commercialize process simulation software. It was later acquired by Avant! and eventually by Synopsys, which today is a major supplier of TCAD tools to the semiconductor industry. In the 1980s, Dutton’s work began including device simulation and was publicly released as PISCES, with successive generations of PISCES incorporating increasingly sophisticated models of device physics. These simulation tools were also adopted by the industry and are commercially available today through EDA companies such as Synopsys and Silvaco.

Robert W. Dutton received the 1996 IEEE Jack A. Morton Award "For seminal contributions to semiconductor process and device modeling." and the 2025 IEEE Jun-ichi Nishizawa Medal “For contributions to and leadership in developing Technology Computer-Aided Design (TCAD) tools for the semiconductor industry.” An IEEE Life Fellow, Dutton is the Robert and Barbara Kleist Professor in the School of Engineering, Emeritus, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA.