New Lab To Draw On Student Research

A private research laboratory that officials say will work with UC Berkeley students and professors to conduct electronic design research opened a new facility in Berkeley yesterday to much fanfare.

Cadence Research Laboratories, owned by electronic design company Cadence Design Systems, has been in Berkeley since 1993. The new 21,000 square-foot lab, located on Shattuck Avenue in Downtown Berkeley, is three times larger than the facility’s previous location on University Avenue.

Company leaders and directors at an opening ceremony yesterday said the new lab is a key investment that will help the company do more innovative research and expand its global influence.

“The new lab will be the center of increasingly global presence in Cadence Design Systems,” said Andreas Kuehlmann, Director of Cadence Research Laboratories and a UC Berkeley adjunct professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Speakers at the ceremony said they believe the lab’s proximity to the university will facilitate information sharing between the two organizations, which could help make the university’s research more marketable.

“Only through industry-university collaborations can innovative discoveries be transformed into practical applications,” said professor Richard Price, UC Berkeley’s associate vice chancellor of research, at the ceremony.

Students will have the opportunity to collaborate with industry engineers through internships and graduate program research, Price said. Students researching with the company can access much of the company’s cutting-edge software, data and equipment.

“This lab is going to bring us into the 22nd century,” said Donald Chai, a graduate student in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

State leaders also said they welcomed the lab.

“It’s a collaboration that can only foster success,” said Congressmember Barbara Lee in a statement.

In keeping with the cutting-edge technology the lab promises to develop, a “virtual ribbon cutting” took place at the ceremony in which participants with test-tube-shaped glasses of champagne toasted a computer-generated projection of scissors cutting through a ribbon.

In further commemoration of the new facility, Cadence Research Laboratories donated $10,000 to the science and math departments at Berkeley High School.

“You can’t have innovation just grow, it has to be cultivated,” said Mike Fister, the company’s president and CEO who presented the check at the ceremony, calling it a “down payment on the future.”

“We couldn’t do what we are doing for the kids without support from the community,” said principal Jim Slemp.

Slemp said the monetary donation was not something the school requested. The company offered it out of their own generosity, he said.

City officials said the lab reflects Berkeley’s creative, “out-of-the-box thinking” and its commitment to top-notch research.

“We think that Cadence is really a natural fit for the innovative spirit of Berkeley,” said Cisco DeVries, chief of staff to Mayor Tom Bates.

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