Title
Bryant, Randy (Randal E.) oral historyCatalog Number
102739941Type
DocumentDescription
Randy Bryant describes his upbringing and people who influenced his early life. His grandfather and father were both professors, and his mother also had a PhD. He developed an early interest in math that he carried on to his college career at the University of Michigan. He quickly got “hooked” on computers. Upon graduation, he headed off to MIT in 1974 to pursue his PhD.While attending MIT he was introduced to VLSI design and as a result saw the need for a high performance switch level simulator to provide functional verification of new designs. His creation, MOSSIM, became wildly popular, not only in the burgeoning university design community but in industry as well, in particular at Intel. His PhD thesis became the development of a more formal model for what had been implanted in an ad hoc fashion.
After earning his PhD, he spent some time at Caltech, but eventually settled in as a professor at Carnegie Mellon. During this time he developed the concept of Binary Decision Diagrams, or BDDs. The original paper he wrote on BDDs has become the most cited paper in computer science. This mathematical insight proved very powerful in the development of future electronic design automation (EDA) tools, including some in the area of formal verification. In addition to his academic accomplishments, he served for 10 years as the Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon until July 2014.
Date
2014-06-15Contributor
Bryant, Randal E., Interviewee |
Fairbairn, Doug, Interviewer |
Fortier, James, Videographer |
Publisher
Computer History MuseumPlace of Publication
Mountain View, CaliforniaExtent
48 p.Format
PDFCopyright Holder
Computer History MuseumCategory
TranscriptionSubject
Electronic design automation (EDA); MOSSIM; VLSI design; Silicon Structures Project; Binary Decision Diagram (BDD); Switch-level simulation; Formal verification; semiconductor historyCollection Title
Oral history collectionCredit
Computer History MuseumLot Number
X7201.2014Related Records
102739940 | Bryant, Randy (Randal E.) oral history |