Inducted May 2012

 

With partner David Chyan, developed the first commercially viable constraint- driven, shape-based router (Specctra), which revolutionized printed circuit board routing. Cofounded Cooper & Chyan Technology in 1989 after leaving Mentor Graphics, where he worked on PCB routing technology. Began work on autorouting at IBM, which he joined in 1961 after college and wrote his first autorouters, including one called Sprint. In 1983 he joined Mentor, where he became primary architect and cowrote the autorouter for the Board Station CAD suite. In 2005, he founded TeraRoute to develop an shape-based autorouter for sub-100-nm IC designs.