Silicon Valley Business Ink

Science and technology rule Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli's mind; life rules his heart.
Sangiovanni-Vincentelli is one of the most highly regarded professors in the nation. Yet his passionate pursuit of ancient Greek and Roman classics rarely makes it into his university lectures, since he's the vice chairman of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Earlier this month, Sangiovanni-Vincentelli received the prestigious Phil Kaufman Award from the Electronic Design Automation Consortium, one of more than two dozen honors and awards he has accumulated during his career.

Sangiovanni-Vincentelli was integral in the founding of two successful chip design automation and simulation companies: San Jose-based Cadence Design Systems Inc., where he holds a board seat, and Synopsys Inc. in Mountain View. He is the author of nearly 600 technical papers and 14 books spanning EDA, control theory, systems theory and applied mathematics.

It's that insatiable pursuit of knowledge that continues to mesmerize and mentor colleagues and students. Jacob White is a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but early in his career he was a doctoral candidate under Sangiovanni-Vincentelli at UC Berkeley. He recalls debating Sangiovanni-Vincentelli over a highly complex theory called wave relaxation.

"He was interested in only two things: Getting the right answer and expressing his pleasure that one of his students had figured out something he had missed," White says.

Luca Daniel can relate. Daniel is a doctoral candidate studying under Sangiovanni-Vincentelli.

"Once you work with Alberto, you are his student forever," Daniel says. "He's more forward-looking than I am, even though I'm 30 years younger."

On the evening of the EDA's award banquet, Sangiovanni-Vincentelli held court in the Fairmont Hotel lounge, and struggled with getting his arms around a question about a single defining juncture in his career.

"There was not really one point, rather a zig-zag collection of points," he says. His English is perfect, but it floats on a cushion of his native Italian.

As the only child of an aristocratic Italian family, Sangiovanni-Vincentelli was born into a set of expectations, the first being the pursuit of classic literature, philosophy and art. By age 12, he had mastered Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and he could translate ancient Greek and Latin by the time he completed high school in Milan.

But he zagged into engineering, also an expectation for well-off Italian men. Then zigged into physics, or what Sangiovanni-Vincentelli calls a "bend toward a zig." But a unifying theme began to emerge at this point of his career -- the melding of theory and application.

To explain his passion for the application of science, Sangiovanni-Vincentelli begins to quote Socrates, St. Augustine and Einstein, delving into the question of whether man is really free, and the true existence of time. Miraculously, he wraps everything back around to theory and application.

"With physics, you explain what God does," he says. "With engineering, you're creating your own universe. You are God."

Whether it's science or philosophy, Sangiovanni-Vincentelli is adamant about distilling disciplines down to their core parts -- the principals of a problem in engineering or the essence of human nature in philosophy. He is a walking zig-zag, a circuit board of seemingly unrelated collection points, a dichotomy of philosophy and science, of heart and mind.

His zig-zags led him toward management, research, even psychoanalysis (he's read every book by Sigmund Freud), yet every approach to these varied disciplines were wrapped around an engineering architecture.

But in 1975 his career zagged again when he was offered a six-month stint as a visiting professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley. He was enthused to experience the Hollywood life of "those crazy Americans."

What he got was the Golden Bear Motel on University Avenue in Berkeley.

"I was ready to go home as soon as I got there," he says.

Back at the Fairmont lounge, sitting comfortably in an ornate chair with leg's crossed, Sangiovanni-Vincentelli drops his chin to his chest in a mock show of indecisiveness. Consequently, he splits his time equally between Berkeley and Milan.

He fidgets a lot, but not out of boredom, rather from the energy he's unable to contain. His hands are as expressive as his face, and both constantly punctuate his speech.

But at day's end, when science yields to art, Sangiovanni-Vincentelli often mentors the hearts of his grad students, preparing a home-cooked meal or thoroughly humbling a student in a three-hour tennis match.

"Sometimes you miss home and just need to cry," says Italian post-doctorate researcher Alessandra Nardi. "If you need 10 days to cry, he will give you 10 days to cry."