Santa Cruz, Calif. -- Few individuals have had as much impact on EDA as A. Richard Newton, dean of the college of engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. It's thus not surprising that Newton's death at 55 last week from pancreatic cancer struck a deep chord in the industry he helped create.

Newton, who joined the Berkeley faculty in 1978, played key roles in the formation of Cadence Design Systems Inc. and Synopsys Inc. He was founding director of the Marco/Darpa Gigascale Systems Research Center for design and test. He oversaw fundamental research in Spice simulation, mixed-mode simulation and CAD frameworks.

Newton was also keenly interested in the application of information and computing technologies to global problems. He had a central role in the creation of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society. Now a broad, multiuniversity effort, Citris tackles problems such as energy, health care and poverty with a multidisciplinary engineering approach.

"I cannot think of anybody else who had a deeper impact at all levels than Richard on the electronics industry," said Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, an EE professor at Berkeley and a Cadence Design Systems board member. "He articulated the EDA road map 30 years ago, and almost all he said actually happened."

Sangiovanni-Vincentelli said Newton had guided Bill Gates in Gates' philanthropic activities and that Newton's most recent passion, synthetic biology, "is the logical evolution of his thoughts, combining algorithms, software tools and understanding of the application to yield revolutionary results in a field where lives could be saved and poor nations helped."

"What Richard Newton and the other prominent professors at Berkeley did was develop an industry," said Gary Smith, chief analyst at Gary Smith EDA.

Newton was "the ultimate catalyst and enabler," said Aart de Geus, CEO of Synopsys, where Newton was a board member until his death. "His vision, optimism and boundless energy not only shaped modern EDA but stimulated and guided many of us to deliver our personal best."

"Richard was an EDA legend," said Mike Fister, Cadence's president and CEO. "Our industry owes a huge debt of gratitude to him for his vision."

"Richard's energy, enthusiasm and insight were a stimulus to the entire EDA ecosystem," said Wally Rhines, Mentor Graphics Corp. chairman and CEO.

Starting early
Born on July 1, 1951, in Melbourne, Australia, Newton became involved in EDA as an undergrad at the University of Melbourne in the late 1960s. As a computer science student, he began working on an early version of the Spice circuit simulator in 1967 and developed one of the first interactive versions of Spice in 1971, using an ASR33 teletype. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Melbourne in 1973 and 1975, respectively.

At the urging of Don Pederson, another EDA pioneer and a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, Newton came to California for his PhD work. For his dissertation, he developed a mixed-mode logic, timing and circuit simulator. He earned his PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences in 1978 and was appointed to the engineering faculty the same year. Subsequent research with his students yielded the first iterative timing analyzer and the first multiprocessor-based circuit simulator.

But Newton is probably best known for bringing EDA research into the real world. From 1980 to 1983, he worked with Jim Solomon, then at National Semiconductor, to commercialize an extensible, programmable environment for building EDA applications. Solomon then formed SDA Systems, which merged with ECAD in 1988 to form Cadence. Later in the decade, Newton worked with de Geus, who had developed a synthesis program called Socrates at General Electric, to launch Synopsys.

He also helped to launch PiE Design Systems and Simplex Solutions. He served on the boards of numerous companies and had been a venture partner with the Mayfield Fund and Tallwood Venture Capital. From November 1994 to July 1995, he was acting president and CEO of Silicon Light Machines, a development-stage company in the display market.

In 2003, Newton won the EDA industry's highest honor, the EDA Consortium Phil Kaufman award. Asked at the time what he viewed as his greatest contribution to EDA, Newton answered, "My students."

Citris director Shankar Sastry said Newton espoused the notion of "technology in the interest of society" and had taken particular interest in a project to bring information and communications technology to the 4 billion people in the world who make less than $2,000 per year. Newton helped make the business case for using low-cost cell phones to improve the lives of impoverished people.

Newton is survived by his wife, Petra Michel, and daughters Neris, 13, and Amrita, 10. The family has requested that instead of flowers, contributions be made to the Regents of the University of California, payable to the Berkeley Center for Synthetic Biology. n