William S. Carter and Stephen Trimberger Receive the 2018 IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits [IEEE News

Abstract

The IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits was established by the IEEE Board of Directors in 1987. This award for outstanding contributions in solid-state circuits is given to an individual or team of not more than three. In November 2005, this IEEE Technical Field Award was named after Donald O. Pederson of the University of California, Berkeley. Before then, it was called the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Award. The recipients of the 2018 award are William S. Carter and Stephen Trimberger “for contributions to field-programmable gate array technology.” Carter and Trimberger were pioneers at Xilinx, creating and refining an impor tant new semiconductor product categor y field-programmable gate-array (FPGA) technology, now a multibillion-dollar industry. Carter saw that Moore’s law would make FPGAs increasingly capable and useful and developed efficient circuits for implement ing programmable logic. He designed the Xilinx XC2000 and XC3000 FPGAs and led the engineering effort on later versions.