Rinaldo Castello and the Analog-Design Environment in Pavia: A Success Story

I met Rinaldo Castello for the first time in the early eighties, during one of my visits at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a PhD student at the EECS Department. Following that first encounter our paths were destined to cross each other many more times in the future, as I will describe in the following, giving me the opportunity not just to become acquainted with his work, but also to know him deeper at personal level. This made me realize that, although we were working on different aspects of Microelectronics (in my case at the device level, as opposed to the circuit level for him) we had much in common in the approach we took while pursuing our scientific goals. We were both committed to deliver a solid scientific education as well as a strong intellectual rigor to our students. Furthermore, we both desired to raise Italy?s reputation and credibility at the international level in our own fields.