10. Februar 2006
Laudatio anlässlich der Verleihung
der Ehrendoktorwürde
Dr.-Ing. h.c. an
Herrn Prof. Dr. Daniel D. Gajski
Prof. Dr. Franz Rammig
Magnifizenz, dear Dan, dear Anna, Ladies and
Gentlemen,
Today we are honouring a hero of Computer Science. I
could characterize him as one of the grand old men in
Electronic Design Automation. But I will not. First of all
Prof. Daniel Gajski is not an old man at all and on the
other hand people may think that by grand I want to
characterize his tall appearance. So I prefer to call him a
hero.
At many universities oral examinations as part of a PhDexam start with the head of the examination committee
introducing the candidate via his CV. Today we do not
have an exam: Who of us could examine Prof. Gajski!
Nevertheless I will shortly recall his CV:
Daniel D. Gajski did receive his Diploma in Engineering
and his Master of Science degree in Electrical
Engineering from the University of Zagreb, Croatia. In
1974 he did receive his Ph.D. in Computer Science from
the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia.
Now he was ready for major impacts on computer
industry. For 10 years he was a practitioner in the areas
of digital circuit design, super computing and VLSI
design. The results were convincing but for a genius like
Prof. Gajski the perspectives in industry do not reach far
enough. So he decided to join academia again. And of
course not just academia but one of the most prestigious
universities in computer science: the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Finally he contributed
substantially to the high reputation of the Information
and Computer Science Department of the University of
California at Irvine. Here he holds the Henry Samueli
Endowed Chair in the Departments of Electrical and
Computer Engineering and Computer Science and is
founder and director of UCI’s Center of Embedded
Computer Systems.
Due to his pioneering contributions to VLSI design, to
System Level Design and for his work on CAD tools he
was appointed IEEE Fellow.
So, let’s speak about the scientific contributions of Prof.
Gajski:
I remember very well when in the early nineties he used a
party at my home in Paderborn to test the reaction of a
European audience to his ironical dinner speech given
some days later at EURODAC in Hamburg. This speech
was entitled “Publish or Perish: The Easy Way”. No
other person could have given such an ironical speech
better than Daniel Gajski. He always tried the hard way!
The scientific fields where Prof. Gajski made substantial
contributions are manifold and his achievements are
highly impressive.
At Urbana-Champain, he concentrated his research on
parallel processing and computer architecture. He was
the principal architect of the CEDAR machine, the
leading US supercomputer project at that time. There
were only few remarkable scientific papers in the field of
supercomputer architectures at this time that did not
reference the research carried out by Prof. Gajski.
In the sequel Daniel Gajski concentrated his research on
the design process of digital systems. His achievements
cover many aspects of this area. He especially
contributed to formalize and automate the design process,
from specification down to implementation. These efforts
have later been extended by him towards embedded
systems. His development of modeling techniques,
design languages, and algorithms to support
specification, analysis, validation and synthesis of
embedded computer systems has substantial impact on
the entire field.
Daniel Gajski is an outstanding visionary. This enabled
him to discover fundamental principles in the design of
digital systems. Once he complained that the most cited
of his numerous publications is this one with the least
content. He meant his famous article where he introduced
what is known as Gajski’s Y-diagram today. With that
assessment of his article, however, he was unnecessarily
unpretentious. Before Gajski’s Y-diagram has been
introduced there was a great confusion and fruitless
discussions about structuring the design process and the
documents produced during this process. Just by ordering
the documents in two orthogonal aspects, namely levels
of abstraction and views he succeeded to sort out the
chaos. He identified the fundamental views of behaviour,
structure and geometry and initiated a discussion about
the levels of abstraction to be considered when designing
digital systems. This contribution was a great
achievement in an academic sense. From now on it was
much easier to teach students how to design digital
systems; it became much easier to identify research areas
und uncovered research challenges. Even more
important: this result allowed the design automation
industry to develop so successfully. As there was a
general agreement now, which type of documents have to
be produced during the design process and how these
documents can be categorized it also became much
clearer what type of tools are necessary to create these
documents. As a result the design of digital systems is
categorized and harmonized in a way much superior to
most other engineering disciplines. When people use
digital electronics as the example of rapidly developing
technology: the principle driving force is design
automation. And design automation needs well
understood principles and categories. So it was just this
little article by Dan Gajski which did light the fire!
Daniel Gajski’s did not just light the fire, he also fuelled
it substantially. During the last three decades he achieved
pioneering results. He was a principal contributor to the
areas Silicon Compilation, High-Level Synthesis, and
System-Level Design.
In the eighties Daniel Gajski made major contributions in
the development of Silicon Compilation. This was the
first time when digital circuits have been developed
based on a formal specification. In those days this
approach was completely novel. It became the starting
point of electronic design automation as used everywhere
in industry today.
In the late eighties Daniel Gajski became one of the main
pioneers in creating the research area of
High-Level Synthesis. Following his strict scientific way
of thinking he introduced very clear definitions of
problems to be solved, developed new algorithms and
implemented successful prototypes. He was well ahead
of the general development. Concepts of High Level
Synthesis are entering industrial application just now;
more than a decade after Dan Gajski’s pioneering work.
The “Interactive Synthesis Environment (ISE)” may
serve as an example. It was developed under the
leadership of Dan Gajski, introduced successfully to the
market and finally resulted in founding YExplorations,
Inc., a start-up company that develops advanced HighLevel Synthesis tools and brings them to market.
In the early nineties Daniel Gajski moved his concern to
the completely new area of
System-Level design. He created new approaches for an
integrated development of HW/SW-Systems. Together with his research group he
developed the so called „100-hour design cycle“, which
resulted in a tremendous enhancement of productivity
and design time reduction. For this purpose Dan Gajski
developed the first generation of system level design
languages and tools: SpecCharts and SpecSyn. They
successfully addressed the new challenges of system
level design.
Prof. Gajski never rests content with achieved results. So
in the late nineties he developed a second generation of
System-Level Design methods und tools, now based on
the C-language. At the same time these techniques allow
reuse of design components (IPs or COTs) in a well
structured manner.
Daniel Gajski is Spiritus Rector and leader of a research
team that developed the language SpecC and the design
method based on this language. This language definition
had a worldwide impact on both, academia and industry.
In 1999 a couple of leading companies created the SpecC
Technology Open Consortium (STOC) in order to further
and standardize the SpecC technology. Today STOC is
formed by more than 30 universities and more than 30
companies, including INTEL, Motorola, NEC, Sony,
Toshiba, and Yamaha.
Concepts and results of Dan Gajski can be found also in
other leading System Level design languages and design
flows, as widely accepted in industry. The SpecC
language as well as its methodology is cited as reference
and inspiration for the development of SystemC, which
currently is mostly used in System Level design. In
addition a couple of newly founded companies (e.g.
InterDesign Technologies, Inc. in Japan) rest on SpecC
technology.
Daniel Gajski is founder and director of the Center for
Embedded Computer Systems (CECS) at the University
of California at Irvine. CECS is a leading research
institute for embedded applications in the automotive,
communications and medical areas. Currently CECS
consists of 22 faculty members and 70 graduate students
in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
Aerospace, and Medical Science. We at Heinz Nixdorf
Institute in Paderborn are proud that a formal cooperation
agreement of our two institutes shows the signature of
Prof. Gajski.
In his academic career Dan Gajski was advisor of more
than 30 Ph.D. students. In the mean-time they became
either professors at prestigious universities or went to
leading companies of the EDA industry like Synopsys,
Cadence, Mentor Graphics. In most cases these former
students of Dan Gajski became key persons in their
companies.
There is no serious person of the academic or industrial
community in the EDA field that does not know Prof.
Gajski. As a consequence the invited talks, key note
addresses, and tutorials given at prestigious conferences
or for leading companies cannot be counted. In addition
he has been invited to innumerable panel discussions and
guest lectures.
It is not surprising that he was chairing the program
committees of more or less each serious conference in the
field and was reviewer for all major conferences,
journals, and book series. His advice has been asked for
by the government and by companies.
Daniel Gajski is editor, author and co-author of seven
books and numerous book chapters. So he is co-editor of
the book " Advanced Computer Architectures” (IEEE
Press, 1986) and editor of the book " Silicon Compilation
"(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1988). He co-authored
the books „High Level Synthesis: An Introduction to
Chip and System Design” (New York: KluwerAcademic,1992), “Specification and Design of
Embedded Systems” (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1994), “SpecC: Specification Language
and Methodology” (Boston:
Kluwer-Academic, 2000), and “System-level Design: A
Practical Guide with SpecC”
(Boston: Kluwer-Academic, 2001). Finally he is author
of the textbook "Principles of
digital Design“" (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1995) used worldwide at universities for teaching digital
design. Dan Gajski’s books have been translated into
many languages and are highly acknowledged as leading
books of the respective areas. In addition to his books
Dan Gajski published more than 200 papers in leading
journals and conferences. He received a couple of best
paper awards and nominations. He is holding five patents
in the area of computer design. A couple of
standardisation committees have been chaired by him or
he was member of them.
It is not surprising that Dan Gajski received numerous
research grants during his professional career.
To sum up: Prof. Daniel Gajski made fundamental
contributions to the state of the art in the field electronic
design automation. A great impact on the way how
digital HW/SW-systems are designed today in theory and
practice can be observed.
The Carl von Ossietzki Universität Oldenburg is just the
right place to honour Prof. Daniel Gajski by a
philosophical doctor for honour’s sake. There are long
lasting research connections, especially to the group of
Prof. Nebel. Dan Gajski gave a couple of talks here in the
informatics colloquium and gave substantial advice to a
couple of Ph.D. students in Oldenburg. Teaching in
technical informatics at the University of Oldenburg is
heavily influenced by the results of Dan Gajski’s
research.
Prof. Daniel Gajski and honourable representatives of the
Carl von Ossietzki Universität Oldenburg: I would like to
congratulate both; Prof. Daniel D. Gajski for his
philosophical doctor degree for honour’s sake and the
University for being honoured at the same time by such
an outstanding scientist among its laureates.
Thank you very much!