The 2017 IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award Winners [Guest Editorial]

This special section honors he 2017 recipients of the IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits: Dr. Takao Nishitani and Dr. John Thompson. The late Prof. Pederson pioneered the semiconductor industry as we know it today, not only through many generations of Berkeley students but also through seminal work on computer aided design tools (especially SPICE) that made it possible to handle the ever-growing complexity of ICs, without which, Moore’s law notwithstanding, we may never have been able to scale the design effort and design complex chips. It is therefore befitting that we honor two pioneers of a key segment on the IC industry, which we take for granted today, the digital signal processing industry.