Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of SPICE!

2023 marks a very special anniversary for MWSCAS. Back in 1973 MWSCAS was called the Midwest Symposium on Circuit Theory. Despite being the 16th edition of the symposium it had not yet entered the IEEE conference family, and for the first time it was held outside the United States, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. But there is a much more significant milestone to celebrate than that. Probably no single event has had more influence on the semiconductor industry than the development, and public domain release, of the Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE). SPICE ushered in the transformation from IC design being based on hand-analysis and bread-boarding to being done by digital computer, thereby enabling the development of designs with much higher transistor counts, it revolutionized how circuit design was taught at universities, and it helped spawn the whole EDA industry. So, what a feather-in-the-cap for MWSCAS, as the chosen venue to unleash SPICE on the world 50 years ago!

Here is the abstract from that paper:

Take special note of the last sentence. SPICE was so successful because Larry Nagel got both the algorithms and the models right.