Brayton, Bob (Robert K.) oral history
Bob grew up in Ames, Iowa, home of Iowa State University. Living amongst all those professors and the son of a high school teacher, he understood the value of education. He entered Iowa State as an aeronautical engineer major, but eventually ended up focusing on electrical engineering. Upon graduation, he worked for Sperry helping to develop a computer for an ICBM. Then after six months to fulfill his ROTC commitment, he headed back to school. He entered MIT in 1957, majoring in math. Within the math department, he was introduced to the world of computing, writing a Lisp compiler as well as other activities. Upon earning his PhD, Brayton went to work at IBM Yorktown Heights Research Center, where he was able to continue to pursue his dual interests in math and computers. His work on developing new ways to mathematically represent electronic circuits at first led to improved circuit simulation tools. From there, Bob moved onto logic circuits and became interested in determining what logic functions could be mapped onto a particular set of logic. This eventually led to cooperation with UC Berkeley on two-level logic minimization. Several years later he left IBM and became a professor at UC Berkeley. His work at Berkeley was heavily focused on formal logic verification.
Item Details
- Date
- 2014-03-20 (Made)
- Type
- Document
- Catalogue number
- 102746880
- Organization
- Computer History Museum (Publisher)
- People
- James Fortier (Videographer)
Robert K. Brayton (Interviewee)
Doug Fairbairn (Interviewer) - Category
- Transcript
- Format
- Credit line
- Computer History Museum
- Extent
- 44 p.
- Place of publication
- USA/CA/Mountain View
- Language
- English
- Acquisition number
- X7128.2014
- Subject
- Semiconductor History, Electronic Design Automation (EDA), Synopsys, Synthesis, Binary Decision Diagram (BDD)
- Archive collection
- Oral history collection
- Archive hierarchy
- CHM Oral History Collection