De Man retires

Earlier this week on his 65th birthday, Hugo De Man ended his career as a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven and as a Senior Fellow at IMEC.

Earlier this week on his 65th birthday, Hugo De Man ended his career as a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven and as a Senior Fellow at IMEC.

During a solemn ceremony he received the emeritus status for his outstanding career that marked both the scientific and the industrial world.

"Hugo's mission was always to bring universities and industry closer together".

"He not only realised this within IMEC but also spread the word worldwide in numerous remarked keynote speeches", said Gilbert Declerck, President and CEO, IMEC.

"From the start of his career, he was convinced that research and education go hand in hand".

"He found training of people in design automation as important as doing research in this field, since research results only lead to industrial impact when designers actually know how to use them".

"Today, he is more than ever fascinated by the fundamental limitations that physics and technology bring to circuit design".

"His worldwide recognised statement to bridge the gap between process and design engineers has brought a shift in the way industry is looking to solve design bottlenecks".

"Based on his expertise in circuit design and physics, he started to bring both worlds together to learn to speak each other language".

"We are very grateful for Hugo's remarkable achievements and we are also very fortunate to have Hugo still with us as a consultant and as an ambassador for the university and for IMEC in the coming years".

Hugo De Man was born on 19th September 1940 in Boom, Belgium.

Exactly 65 years later he has been honoured with an emeritus status for his scientific achievements as well as his impact on industry.

His research was published in more than 150 international journal papers and almost 440 international refereed conference papers.

Hugo De Man won numerous awards among which eight best paper awards, one best circuit award, the Phil Kaufman Award of the Electronic Design Automation Consortium (1999), the Golden Jubilee Medal of the IEEE Circuits and System Society for "Exceptional contributions toward advancing circuits and systems society goals during its 50 years of existence" (1999) and two lifetime achievement awards, one from the European Design Automation Association (2004) and one from the European Electronics Industry (2004).

Hugo De Man's career started in 1964 with a degree in electrical engineering, followed by a PhD degree in applied sciences (1968), both from the University of Leuven.

In 1968 he became a member of the staff of the University of Leuven, working on device physics and integrated circuit technology.

From 1969 to 1971 he was with the Electronic Research Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, as an ESRO-NASA Postdoctoral Research Fellow, working on computer-aided device and circuit design.

In 1971 he returned to the University of Leuven as a Research Associate of the NFWO (Belgian National Science Foundation).

In 1974 he became a Full Professor at the University of Leuven.

In 1975 he was visiting professor at UC Berkeley, teaching IC design and device physics.

From 1984 to 1995 he was Vice-President of the VLSI systems design group of IMEC (Leuven, Belgium).

Since 1995 he has been a Senior Research Fellow of IMEC, responsible for research in system design technologies.

Hugo De Man is an IEEE Fellow and a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Belgium.

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