Antun Domic

Antun Domic (born November 30, 1951) is a Chilean-American engineer and mathematician, and a pioneer in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry.

Early life and education

Domic was born in Antofagasta, Chile. He graduated with a BS (Licenciatura) from the Universidad Tecnica del Estado, Santiago, Chile in 1973, having studied Mathematics and Electrical Engineering. Domic obtained his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, in 1978, with a dissertation in partial differential equations.

Career

In 1982 he became a member of the technical staff of MIT Lincoln Laboratories in Lexington, MA. While there, Domic and his colleagues developed LBS (Lincoln Boolean Synthesizer), an automatic layout generator (from Boolean equations) which was used to fabricate one of the very first CMOS chips using Lynn Conway’s MOSIS (Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service).

In 1985, Domic joined Digital Equipment Corporation in Hudson, MA, where he led a major fraction of the in-house EDA platform used to design the world most complex 64-bit RISC processor at the time, the Alpha 21064: 1.7 million transistors implemented in 750nm CMOS, running at 200MHz. One of the EDA tools developed by Domic and his colleagues was CLEO, an automatic layout generator (from schematic) which was used to design blocks of several RISC processors at DEC.

In 1987, Domic coauthored with Domingo Toledo the seminal paper "The Gromov norm of the Kähler class of symmetric domains" (Mathematische Annalen. 276 no. 3, 425–43). Both Toledo Invariant $T(\rho )$ - an important numerical invariant of Milnor-Wood Inequality which are at the heart of Higgs Bundles – and the so-called Domic-Toledo Space $(\mathrm {X} ,\Omega ,\mathrm {K} )$ have received renewed attention in recent times.

After leaving DEC in 1994, Domic worked at Cadence Design Systems, where he led the logic synthesis and place-and-route products.

Domic joined Synopsys in 1997 as vice-president of engineering for the Design Tools Group, and progressively expanded his responsibilities. He was the general manager of the Nanometer Analysis & Test Group and, shortly after Synopsys acquired Avant! Corporation in 2001, Domic's responsibilities expanded to include place-and-route and physical verification, forming the Implementation Group. Later, the custom layout tools were added, forming the Design Group.

At the end of 2016, Domic was appointed Synopsys CTO.

Domic retired in 2019, and is currently a lecturer in the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.

Domic is an IEEE Fellow, and the recipient of the 2019 IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal. He has served, in various capacities, in the technical and executive committees of several IEEE conferences, including ICCAD, ICCD, DAC and DATE.