Shawn Hailey, author of HSPICE died on October 14, 2011

[Daniel Payne]

The Hailey twins Shawn and Kim were legendary in Silicon Valley having written HSPICE, considered by many as the Gold-Standard for SPICE circuit simulators over decades.

My first use of HSPICE was at Wang Laboratories back in 1982, where we had to use a dial-up connection to a mainframe running HSPICE. I was simulating a CMOS design at the 6um node, or the 6,000 nm node to put it in perspective with today's designs at 28nm.

Wikipedia has a page about Shawn, later renamed to Ashawna.

A 1997 interview with Kim and Shawn Hailey as part of the Silicon Genesis project at Stanford.

Obituary in the Mercury News.

 

[colindente]

Sad news

I knew Shawn in the early 90s - he was a genuinely nice guy.

 

[srburnham]

Sad news, indeed.

I first came into contact with the Hailey brothers when working at Burr-Brown in the early 80s (81, 82 or so...). We bought a copy of the source code for HSpice in order to transition from dial-up, timeshare simulation. After hiring a physics student from UofA to rewrite portions of it, we put this code on a VAX, canceled the timeshare relationship and never looked back. Shawn was part of a legend.

 

[srburnham]

my bad...

Of course, I should never have written "...brothers." I apologize to the Hailey family or anyone else offended by my slip.

 

[jwsmith]

Dan, Thanks for sharing.

 

[lucik123]

Thanks for sharing the information.

 

[Tammy1949]

I knew Shawn in the early 90s - he was a genuinely nice guy.