IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Summer 2016 - 25

to teaching VLSI, which was surprisingly interesting. And by attending
that class, I was selected to teach it
next time and it put me on a path to
becoming a teacher, something that
I had never even considered. I guess
this is what Randy Pausch meant
when he said, "... brick walls are there
to give us a chance to show how badly
we want something. Because the brick
walls are there to stop the people who
don't want it badly enough. They're
there to stop the other people."
In 1983, during the final year of my
Ph.D. program, I went back to DEC and
taught the VLSI class. I knew that it
was good to make jokes during a lecture, to loosen things up. So before I
left, I tried telling a few of my friends
a joke or two. One of them told me
that I should never try to tell a joke; I
had the worst timing of all the people
he knew. I reluctantly decided that I
should play it straight.
When I got there and started
lecturing, of course I made a few
mistakes. The one I remember was
when I was describing the size of a
feature on an IC, I first said "it was
tiny weeny." Then realizing that was
probably not the best description,
I said "no I mean it is very small." I
stopped, realizing that this wasn't
any better the first description and
broke out in a big smile. Once I
stopped and smiled, the whole room
burst out laughing.
This taught me two important
points. First I could be funny, but I
just couldn't plan to be funny. If I was
willing to laugh at my silly mistakes,
others would laugh also, and I could
make the class more enjoyable for
the students. Second, and probably
more important, it taught me not to
be worried about making mistakes,
since as long as I was not bothered
by them, they wouldn't bother the
students, and, when handled well,
can add some humor to the class.
These points would serve me well
for the next 30+ years. While I
would like to say that my ability to
tell jokes has improved, that would
be a lie. My timing still is awful. But
my students do laugh in my class,

If I was willing to laugh at my silly mistakes,
others would laugh also, and I could make
the class more enjoyable for the students.

generally after I have done something pretty silly.
It was the first time I had taught,
and to make the situation more interesting, DEC recorded the lectures so
engineers who couldn't attend the
class while I was there could watch it
on video. Because of cell phone cameras, today everyone is used to seeing themselves on video, but in 1983,
video recording was pretty unusual.
Being curious, I wanted to see what I
looked like while I taught. Talk about
a painful experience. I never knew I
had so many verbal ticks. I won't list
them all here, as it would take up too
much space, but the worst one was I
would continually say "k" for ok, like
I was checking to see if the class was
following, but wouldn't pause at all. It
was awful. Yet between all those "k"s
I heard someone explaining things
the way I like have things explained,
and that was very nice.
I was always shy when I was growing up and was never comfortable
in being in a large group, so I was
surprised at how comfortable I was
when I was teaching. I also realized
that I was a little bit of a ham and
liked being on stage. But the best
part of teaching was helping students understand new concepts and
seeing their expression when they
"got it." For me, teaching was another
one of those puzzles that I loved to
work on. Here the puzzle is to figure
out the framework of the students so
you can bring them from where they
are to where you want them to be. It
was surprisingly fun.
I ended up teaching many classes
at DEC and through that met many
of the top IC designers there, including working with Dan Dobberpuhl,
another person who mentored me. So
by early 1983, I realized that teaching
was kind of fun, and I actually considered being a professor teaching

VLSI. When some of my old professors at MIT asked me if I would apply
to their faculty search, I did. During
this same time, Stanford was forming the Center for Integrated Systems
(CIS), one of the first large industrial
consortiums focused on IC design and
manufacturing issues. As part of this
effort, the EE department was given
some additional billets for faculty in
the integrated systems area. I was a
little surprised when my advisor, Bob
Dutton, suggested that I apply to the
Stanford search.
By the summer of 1983, I had an
offer letter from MIT and very positive noises from Stanford, and I
needed to decide what to do. That
was a disaster. I can't tell you how
many times I flip-flopped. After talking with people from MIT, I decided
to go to MIT; after talking to people
from Stanford, I decided to so to Stanford. Looking back, I feel bad for the
people who were trying to recruit
me. I wish I could say that after this
experience I learned my lesson, but
unfortunately this happened to me
again and again until I realized what
was going on: I really like being right.
No, that is not right. Being right is
ok; I just hate being wrong. This was
helpful for me in design projects
since, as I discussed earlier, my confidence drove me to try new things,
and my need to succeed helped me
make sure they worked. But there
are many situations in life where
the data you have when you need to
make a decision can't help you distinguish between the outcomes. In
these situations, the fear of making
a bad decision makes it very hard to
make any decision, which is a bad
outcome. I finally realized that if I
am in a situation where I can't make
a decision, this means that choices,
at the present time, are indistinguishable, since otherwise I would

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Summer 2016