Master of Abstraction

I was supposed to meet Alberto in the spring of 1986. I was a graduating senior with a National Science Foundation (NSF) fellowship in hand and acceptance letters from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford, so I decided to visit the Bay Area on my spring break to decide which university to attend. I had told the NSF that I was hoping to work on analog circuit synthesis, and it was already clear that the best place in the world to do that would be in the research groups of Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli and Richard Newton. However, I was more aggressive than that! My intention was to complete an IC-focused one year master´s degree at Stanford first and then transfer to Berkeley for my Ph.D., saving the time of a master´s thesis while getting the benefits of two world-class institutions. For my plan to work, I needed to know that there would be a spot for me at Berkeley—in what was then called the CAD group—in a year.