Phil Moorby -
The annual Phil Kaufman Award dinner is always an important landmark on the EDA calendar, and this year was no exception. The dinner was a festive one, full of friends and associates all very happy to be together and able to share in an evening honoring this year's award winner, Phil Moorby. Phil Moorby is currently with Synopsys, but previously was at Co-Design where he helped develop and promote Superlog, the precurser to SystemVerilog, along with Peter Flake, Simon Davidmann, and Dave Kelf. Previously, Moorby was at Cadence, and of course, at Gateway Design Automation which is where his crucial work on Verilog took place in the mid 1980's. U.C. Berkeley Dean Richard Newton, the traditional Kaufman Award Dinner MC, introduced Moorby to the November 1st dinner audience and heaped glowing praise on the man credited with developing the Verilog hardware design language. Newton was unequivocal in describing the significant impact the language has had over the last 20 years on the technology surrounding hardware design. In particular, he quoted a recent statistic from John Cooley's ESNUG which declared that 60 percent of all hardware design worldwide is carried out in Verilog today. Professor Newton also took particular care to describe the most significant aspects of Moorby's presence as a developer and technologist: "Phil is someone who is quiet and in the background, but always the true expert – recognized by other true experts because he is working on what is really important." Newton closed his introduction with a comment that resonated with Moorby's many friends and associated in the audience, those who have had the opportunity to share in his professional life. "In Phil Moorby," Richard Newton said, "still waters run deep." When Phil Moorby came to the podium to accept his award, the remarkable part of his presentation was not the detail with which he outlined his personal history. Instead, the remarkable aspects of his comments were the humility and gratitude with which he thanked the many associates and friends that had worked side-by-side with him through the long years of his career. He was particularly careful to point out the debt of gratitude owed to his wife, Judith. As far as his own contributions were concerned, he said little if anything at all. Many of the people that Moorby thanked during his minutes at the podium were actually sitting in the audience. For many it was a grand reunion of some of the great names associated with the history of EDA over the last 20 years. Just this week, the EDA Consortium has announced that the full videotape of the November 1st presentation is now available on line on the EDAC website. However, if you view the tape, you will not see the fact that two particular individuals were influential in singling out Phil Moorby to receive the 2005 Kaufman Award. Luminaries Scott Sandler and John Sanguinetti together composed the Moorby nomination, and they reportedly take great pride in knowing that their candidate has now received his well-deserved and possibly overdue acknowledgement from the EDA industry. In years past, I have had a chance to interview numerous Kaufman Award winners. This year was to be no different, however I was unprepared for the reluctance with which Phil Moorby would come to the task of speaking about himself. The following Q&A, therefore, may seem somewhat abbreviated in comparison to previous profiles I have assembled. However, I believe that if you watch the EDAC video of Phil's acceptance speech and read the following, you will clearly see that this is a man who is grateful for what has come his way in life, and therefore does not need to spend excess amounts of time speaking about himself or his accomplishments. His is a lesson for all of us – not just of a life rich in technical excellence, but also of a life rich in profound personal integrity as well.
Q: Where did you grow up? Phil Moorby: I was born and grew up in Birmingham, England. Q: Where did you go to college and graduate school? Phil Moorby: My undergraduate work was at Southampton University in England, where I received a B.Sc in Mathematics. I received a Masters in computer science from Manchester University, England in 1974. Q: When did you first hear the term EDA? Phil Moorby: My EDA career started in 1975 with a Masters degree project on automatic test generation and the testing of printed circuit boards for the MU5 mainframe computer that was built by Manchester University in the 70's. I was so attracted to the combined hardware and software nature of the research. I continued in the field by joining Brunel University on a PhD research program on dynamic timing analysis. I was soon completely consumed with the HILO project at Brunel, along with Peter Flake, developing and implementing the HILO HDLs and simulators rather than finishing my PhD. The general term for the industry in the 1970's was Electronic CAD. Q: What do you learn in your early days working in CAD? Phil Moorby: There were always two major challenges – the speed of simulation, and how to develop and convince hardware designers that a text-based HDL was a better and more efficient means than schematic entry. An HDL text-based language had to have the ability to model exactly what the designer was trying to build and verify at the gate and switch levels, but also have – or try to have – the succinctness and power of software languages. In the 70's and early 80's, simulation was focused on fault simulation as the compelling tool to sell in the market, and performance was never enough. Through the 80's, the focus started to shift more towards verification, and simulation speed became the major challenge in penetrating the main stream market. Q: How did the invention of Verilog come about? Phil Moorby: In 1983, as the HILO team was breaking up and changing in nature, I decided to come to the U.S. and join Prabhu Goel and the Gateway startup. The Gateway vision actually was two fold – fast test pattern generation products and a synthesis product based on work by Chi-Lai Huang, who had also joined Gateway. The day I joined Gateway, I convinced Prabhu that the synthesis product would need a new language and simulator to go with it, and so the Verilog HDL and simulator were born. It took one intense year to build the product to a state of being able to sell it. At that time, hardware accelerators were hitting the market and it was surprising how popular they quickly became even though they were so difficult to use. I was convinced that a software-only simulator could compete with them if designed and implemented with every optimization trick I could invent. After about another year, Verilog-XL was born and did very well in competing with the hardware accelerators on speed, and was naturally much easier to use – not to mention the price difference! Even though Gateway had planned to build a synthesis product, we cooperated and worked with a few synthesis startups. And, as we all know, Synopsys' Design Compiler grew to dominate the market. Gateway decided to focus on verification instead and in particular the ASIC verification market. Over the next five or six years – 1985 to 1990 – the Verilog-XL product grew and dominated the 'Golden simulator' status of the ASIC vendors. The work was intense at times, especially when some customer on the verge of making a decision to buy, would suddenly demand some new feature. Although we never admit this, some of the strange and not-so-well thought out parts of Verilog were from these frantic times of trying to satisfy customer demands. Verilog HDL and the Verilog-XL product were very much customer driven systems. With the help of Synopsys's Design Compilers in the market, Verilog-XL was able to convince hardware designers that a text-based RTL was the way to achieve greater productivity in the design process.
After Phil Moorby spoke at the podium on November 1st, I asked Scott Sandler and John Sanguinetti what they thought about the evening's proceedings. Scott said, "Phil Moorby is one of the most significant people I have ever known. When he speaks, you better listen." John said, "Nobody deserves this award as much as Phil Moorby. EDAC giving him the award confers as much honor on EDAC as it does on Phil."
Peggy Aycinena owns and operates EDA Confidential. She can be reached at peggy@aycinena.com |