Aart J. de Geus

Chairman and CEO, Synopsys Inc.

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

Going digital. The immense growth in electronics happened because the paradigm has moved away from electricity to Boolean logic.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Using larger and larger building blocks to design a chip, and designing smaller and smaller devices and dealing with the resulting physics.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

How far chip sizes have been driven down. The surprise there is photolithography.

"In chip design, every 10 years or so we see a big step up, from transistors to gates to macros to IT blocks that are complete microprocessors. This allows people to design very complex systems without even knowing what's inside these blocks. But as device switches get smaller and smaller, many are not quite on or off. They become leaky.

"Over the last 40 years we've seen the development of independent point tools that perform all the steps it takes to create a chip. But one needs to go to a complete integrated design solution because the physics is trickling up and the complexity is trickling down. This allows you to be much more comprehensive about problems that used to be simple and now have so many more dimensions."