Artifact Details

Title

Joyner, Jr., Bill (William H.) oral history

Catalog Number

102739973

Type

Document

Description

Despite growing up in the mountains of Virginia and in a family with no technology roots, Bill Joyner, he found himself interested in math and physics. He entered the engineering school at the University of Virginia in 1964. While there he studied a variety of engineering topics, graduating in 1968 with an interest in programming languages and formal logic. Bill moved onto graduate school at Harvard where he wrote his thesis on “Automatic Theorem Proving and the Decision Problem.”

Upon leaving Harvard with his PhD in 1973, he joined IBM where he was initially involved with formal techniques to find problems in microcode. Following this work, he teamed up with John Darringer at IBM to work on Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and in particular on the problem of logic synthesis. His work had a measurable impact on the design of the 3090 computer at the time. Although he held some unrelated positions at times, he continued in his research position at IBM until 1997. At that point he took on the role of IBM’s assignee at the Semiconductor Research Corporation in North Carolina. SRC is a consortium of companies working on long-term research in the semiconductor field. At SRC Dr. Joyner is responsible for the EDA related programs, including funding of research at various universities. While there, Bill has become a true leader in the EDA community with active participation at DAC and with various journals.

Date

2014-11-03

Contributor

Fairbairn, Doug, Interviewer
Fortier, James, Videographer
Joyner, Jr., Bill (William H.), Interviewee

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, California

Extent

33 p.

Format

PDF

Copyright Holder

Computer History Museum

Category

Transcription

Subject

semiconductor history; formal methods; Formal verification; EDA; SRC; DAC

Collection Title

Oral history collection

Credit

Computer History Museum

Lot Number

X7272.2015