Awards
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Colleagues Reflect on Willy Sansen’s Road to the 2011 IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award
Van Overstraeten, having returned from Stanford only a few years before, encouraged both young men to go west, to UC Berkeley, where Don Pederson had started an Integrated Circuit design lab. “UC Berkeley was the place to be,” said De Man. “Besides being the Mecca of the flower power movement, it was also a center of creativity and out –of-the-box thinking. We both quickly became heirs to Don’s passion and enthusiasm for circuit design, and the credo that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. In his view, theory only has meaning when you make your hands dirty by building the stuff and measuring its true behavior yourself.” |
Student Awards PRE-DOCTORAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARD Fly to ISSCC, get complimentary registration, and receive $1,000 Honorarium. For SSCS graduate students with PhD dissertation topic selected. Experience the latest at a conference. Network with researchers from around the world, from industry governments and universities. Find out the problems they want solved or have almost solved. For SSCS PhD students only, no dissertation topic needed, one recommendation per professor, various deadlines for various conferences. |
Lifelong colleagues reminisced about the talents of Willy Sansen to celebrate his selection for the 2011 Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits “for leadership in analog integrated design.” “Passionate Master of Elegant Circuitry”
According to De Man, Pederson’s style became Willy’s trademark and legacy to thousands of masters’ and 60 or so Ph.D. students at K.U. Leuven, many of whom went on to become leaders in the field in academia and industry all over the world. “All of them refer to Willy as the enthusiastic, passionate master of the art of analog design who never tires before finding the right way to explain the beauty of elegant circuitry,” he said.
Entrepreneur-Founder of MICAS - the Micro-Electronics and Sensors Group at KU Leuven
As the result of Willy’ belief that engineering research should not only be first-rate academically but also have a major impact on the economy, he was for many years, and still is, a consultant to major semiconductor companies on all continents, De Man continued. According to Pederson nominator Michiel Steyaert, the research conducted by the ESAT-MICAS group founded by Willy within the Electrical Engineering Department of KU Leuven after the creation of IMEC in 1984 is “of extremely high importance and internationally respected” and, according to De Man, has led to as many as five successful spin-off companies in Flanders, Belgium.Today, ESAT-MICAS consists of about six professors, 52 Ph D assistants and 6 technical staff personnel, and sponsors a full track of ICT-Integrated Circuits courses within the Master of Electrical Engineering program at KU Leuven, said Steyaert, who is currently the department chair .
The Godfather of ISSCC Globalization – “Mr. ISSCC”
When Albert Theuwissen, a co-chair of ISSCC 2011 and a student of Willy’s in the mid 70’s re-met him on the ISSCC European Committee in 2000, the “enthusiastic, self-confident, and brilliant didacticus” he remembered “had not changed! Willy had been an excellent people manager as a professor, and as chair of the European ISSCC committee, he did exactly the same,” said Theuwissen. “Under his guidance, the quality as well as the quantity of the European contributions at ISSCC was constantly growing. -- He launched new ideas for improving the Conference, he convinced others to adopt his ideas, he listened to the contributions of others, and he had the ability to judge very quickly whether they could improve ISSCC quality.”
Evidently, the Executive Committee of ISSCC also appreciated Willy’s managerial qualities, said Theuwissen, because it selected him as Vice-Chair in 2001, and Chair, in 2002 of the ISSCC International Technical Program Committee; this was the first time in almost 50 years that an overseas person attained that high post, and a landmark event, for ever since, a European or Far East person has chaired the Technical Program Committee in alternate years. Theuwissen said, “It was Willy Sansen who could convince the Americans that a non-American could do this important job. And it was Willy who made the ISSCC “a real global conference with international participants, international speakers, and international committee members.”
After his ISSCC chairmanship, Willy took on the role of ISSCC Education director and organizer of ISSCC tutorials. In view of Willy’s continuous contributions to ISSCC since 1984, De Man said, “Some have taken to calling him “Mister ISSCC.”
Legatee of Pederson Urbanity
“Behind all Willy’s professional excellence there is also a charming multi-faceted gentleman who is hard to describe in 
a single sentence, De Man observed . “Those who have enjoyed his company discover an independent, sharp thinker, a literature lover, a philosopher, a musician, an epicurean, a wine connoisseur, a golfer and, until some years ago, an excellent soccer player. All of this is clearly in harmony with the wonderful personality of the late Don Pederson who would be proud of Willy’s achievements and this great award in his name.”
The Pederson Award is sponsored yearly by the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society and administered by the Technical Field Awards Council of the IEEE.
K. Olstein
A roster of past Pederson Award winners, with a brief account of its history and how to apply may be found at http://sscs.ieee.org/donald-o-pederson-solid-state-circuits-award.html.
The winter 2011 issue of the Solid-State Circuits Magazine will be devoted to the work of Dr. Sansen.