Donald Pederson

Donald Oscar Pederson (September 30, 1925 – December 25, 2004) was an American professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the designers of SPICE, the canonical integrated circuit simulator.

Biography
Born in Hallock, Minnesota, Dr. Pederson entered Iowa State College in the autumn of 1943, but then left for the military during World War II. He served as a private in the U.S. Army in Germany from 1943 to 1946. Upon his return from service, he continued his undergraduate education at North Dakota Agricultural College (now North Dakota State University) and earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1948. He then attended Stanford University for graduate school, where he received his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1949 and his Ph.D. in 1951.

Pederson remained at Stanford as a researcher in the university's electronics research lab. From 1953 to 1955, he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories, in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and lectured at Newark College of Engineering. In 1955, Pederson joined the faculty of the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences of the University of California, Berkeley as an assistant professor of electrical engineering. In the early 1970s he began work on SPICE, with his colleagues from the Electronic Research Lab. He retired in 1991, but continued to teach part-time.

Pederson died on December 25, 2004 in Concord, California, of complication from Parkinson's Disease.

Awards

 * 1969: IEEE Education Medal
 * 1984: IEEE Centennial Medal
 * 1996: Computer & Communication Promotion Prize
 * 1998: IEEE Medal of Honor for "creation of the SPICE Program, universally used for the computer aided design of circuits."
 * 1995: Phil Kaufman Award

Pederson is member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.