EDAC and the IEEE CEDA held their annual celebration to honor Randal Bryant as the recipient for the Kaufman Award on November 4th. Wally Rhines, chairman of EDAC opened the festivities with a somber note, that EDAC revenues were down for only the second time in recorded history. The industry recorded a revenue drop of 15.8 percent in the second quarter of 2009.

On a more positive note, Rob Rutenbar, professor at CMU, gave the recognition speech and noted that Bryant's contributions have resulted in a market segment creating over $100 M in annual revenues.

Randal Bryant has developed ideas that have made significant impact on EDA and in computing. The genesis of his work came from Claude Shannon's thesis that hardware could be described by equations. As a student, Bryant found that circuit design wasn't that difficult, but the verification was. Some of the past Kaufman winners have created models and abstractions for simulation, but after 50 years, it is increasingly understood that simulation is not comprehensive.

Simulation cannot answer the questions; does the representation implement the specification correctly, after a change is the problem fixed, did a change affect anything else? To compound the problems, the increasing size and complexity of the designs is leading to over 2^100 sets of states. Until the mid '80's there was no way to check designs.

In 1984, Bryant developed the concept of Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (OBDD) which enabled the manipulation of Boolean equations. This concept is essential for formal analysis, synthesis, test, some simulations, and is even used in coding theory and compilers. From the continuing citations in technical literature, this is a fundamental concept. Bryant's paper is the most cited paper in all of computer science as well as in EDA.

As a proof of concept, in 1994, Bryant created a tool that located all of the infamous Pentium divider bugs in 12.5 minutes. Bryant not only developed the basis for the current formal market but also worked on language-based simulators and verification tools. He helped to create the concept of switch-level simulation and models which have resulted in current HDL tools. He has written text books and many other papers on programming and verification.

Wally Rhines and John Derringer, president of IEEE Council on EDA, presented the award to Bryant.

In his acceptance speech, Bryant humbly acknowledged the contributions of previous Kaufman awardees and recognized the balance in contributions from industry and academia. This integration of research and industry had led to products that are accepted fairly quickly within the user base. The industry benefits from this culture as they use the academic research to create or improve tools while the academic researchers are exposed to next-generation problems to investigate sustaining a working eco-system.

Bryant acknowledged the contributions of Mead-Conway in his early graduate work in a project with hardware and software. He changed from a transistor-based to a switch-based perspective for his project with good results. Working with Jon Allen, he developed an appreciation for users as customers and also learned the need for generalization. He wrote the user manual for MOSSIM and COSMOS.

Over time, he learned that new ideas are not hampered by naivety, because the unknowing person is not hampered by legacy issues. Results take refinement and follow-through. Bryant acknowledged the contributions of advisors and mentors in his career, as well as the grad students he worked with. He noted that SRC contributed finances and mentoring while DAC showed him the value of bringing industry, academia, and practitioners together.