Donald Pederson, 79, Chip Scientist -- Rest in Peace

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Subject: Donald Pederson, 79, Chip Scientist

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Parkinson's disease

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Date Posted: January 11, 2005 11:10:06 EDT

Donald Pederson, a computer scientist who oversaw the creation of a widely used tool for the design of electronic circuits, died on Dec. 25 in Concord, Calif. He was 79.

The cause was Parkinson's disease, said his wife, Karen Pederson.

Designers of computer chips need to know how those chips will behave before they make them, but in the 1960's, the software available for simulating the behavior of integrated circuits was slow and unreliable.

That changed in 1972, when Mr. Pederson's laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, created a fast and accurate program called Simulation Program with Integrated Circuits Emphasis, or Spice.

The program quickly became an industry standard, and versions of it are used today to test chips for a wide range of electronic devices, including computers, cellphones, home appliances and vehicles.

Mr. Pederson insisted on making Spice's code available to other engineers as long as they did not sell it and they sent back improvements. This made him one of the first practitioners of the approach now known as open source, colleagues said.

Mr. Pederson was born on Sept. 30, 1925, in Hallock, Minn. After serving in the Army in World War II, he earned a doctorate from Stanford University and worked briefly at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. He went to Berkeley in 1955 and remained there until he retired in 1991, after which he continued to teach part-time.

In the early 1960's, Mr. Pederson persuaded the university to establish the first academic laboratory for the fabrication of microchips, allowing his students to have hands-on experience and keep up with the industry.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Pederson is survived by three daughters, Emily Sanders, Margaret Stanfield, and Katharine Rookard; a son, John; and four grandchildren.

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