Ken Kundert


Contact Ken:
Home Email
Work Email
Ken's PGP key for encrypted email

Ken's websites:
Work: www.designers-guide.com
Community: www.designers-guide.org
Home: www.theKunderts.net
Administering a Linux server: www.nurdletech.com

More on Ken:
Ken's resume
Ken's publications


Ken is a founding partner at Designer's Guide Consulting, a firm dedicated to the idea that, given a good design and verification methodology, it is possible to design complex analog, RF, and mixed-signal chips that work as expected on the first try. Ken and his partner Henry Chang help design companies achieve this ambitious goal.

Ken is known for creating two highly successful circuit simulators: Cadence's Spectre and Agilent's harmonic balance simulator. From 1989 to 2005, Ken worked at Cadence Design Systems as a Fellow. He created Spectre and was the principal architect of the Spectre circuit simulation family. As such, he led the development of Spectre, SpectreHDL, and SpectreRF. He also played a key role in the development of Cadence's AMS Designer and made substantial contributions to both the Verilog-AMS and VHDL-AMS languages. While in school he authored Sparse, an industry standard sparse linear equation solver and created Agilent's harmonic balance simulator. Before that Ken was a circuit designer at Tektronix and Hewlett-Packard, and contributed to the design of the HP 8510 microwave network analyzer. He has written three books on circuit simulation: The Designer's Guide to Verilog-AMS in 2004, The Designer's Guide to SPICE and Spectre in 1995, and Steady-State Methods for Simulating Analog and Microwave Circuits in 1990; and created The Designer's Guide Community website. He has also authored eleven patents and three dozen papers published in refereed conferences and journals.

Ken is a Fellow of the IEEE. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989, his M. Eng. degree in 1983 and his B.S. in 1979.

"Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you from asking the questions."

— Unknown

Several reasons to be skeptical of organized religion ...

"Besides justifying the transfer of wealth to kleptocrats, institutionalied religion brings two other important benefits to centralized societies. First, shared ideology or religion helps solve the problem of how unrelated individuals are to live together without killing each other — by providing them with a bond not based on kinship. Second, it gives people a motive, other than genetic self-interest, for sacrificing their lives on behalf of others, the whole society becomes much more effective at conquering other socieites or resisting attacks."

— Jared Diamond
"Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Fates of Human Societies"


Last updated on Tuesday, October 20, 2009.

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