IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2022 - 5

on Computer-Aided Design and served as President of
the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. How do you think
community service has helped you in your career?
Ron Rohrer: Early in my career, community service
helped me to meet and be influenced by many of the
greats in our field. But those roles you mentioned were
primarily about giving back. Once I'd done that, I moved
aside to allow younger persons the experiences.
Being the Founding Editor of the TCAD Transactions
was incredibly difficult. Why would an established researcher
submit a paper to an unknown journal? I dogged
conferences and invited anyone who delivered an interesting
talk to submit a paper. I also promised an extremely
fast turnaround time, sometimes achieving that by myself
being all three reviewers. I also established that all accepted
publications would be papers, no matter the length: no
such things as " short papers " and no letters to the editor.
My view was and is that something is either worthy of
publication or it's not. Unfortunately, that maxim quickly
fell when I relinquished the editor position in 1984. I don't
know how it is now, but in 1988 the biggest challenge to
being President of CAS was balancing the books and trying
to keep in motion a future of balanced books.
Question 6: What do you think is an exciting trend in
CAD/EDA, especially in the age of artificial intelligence?
Can you share your vision on the possible innovations
in CAD/EDA? What are your suggestions or advice to
younger generation researchers working in these fields?
Ron Rohrer: Anything that can be done can always
be done better. That's an ongoing challenge for CAD/
EDA research. I could just be a senior yelling, " get off
of my lawn, " but actually, I'm wary of the overuse of
artificial intelligence in our field. Sometimes it solves a
problem one couldn't solve otherwise. But often it reveals
that the user has a lack of understanding of the
underlying physics or is just being too lazy to think hard
about the problem. Kirchhoff's Laws solve half of every
circuit problem we'll ever encounter. And they're linear.
We should obey them, not avoid them, or worse yet reinvent
them in some opaque abstraction. Moreover, ML-AI
runs the risk of extrapolation. If a new situation is tantamount
to an interpolation of the training, the outcome
probably will be OK. But if it isn't, beware!
My best advice to young researchers is to make it simple:
I'm wary of solutions to problems that purport to be
better because they're more elaborate or opaque. We're
engineers. If the research doesn't have an industrial impact,
it isn't a solution. And if it doesn't offer significant
benefits to the end-users, it's not likely to get adopted and
see the light of day. This approach has worked for me
for more than sixty years.
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THIRD QUARTER 2022
IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
5
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2022
