This Festschrift is dedicated to Mr. Sorin A. Huss by his friends and his Ph.D. students to honor him duly on the occasion of his 60th birthday.

Mr. Sorin A. Huss was born in Bukarest, Romania on May 21, 1950. He attended a secondary school with emphasis on mathematic and scientific topics in Dachau near Munich and after his Abitur he studied Electrical Engineering with the discipline information technology at the Technische Universit¨at M¨unchen.

1976 he started his career at this university as the first research assistant at the newly established chair for design automation. Due to his very high ability he was a particularly important member of the staff especially in the development phase. In his research Mr. Huss dealt with methods for design automation of integrated circuits. The results of his research activities and his dissertation “Zur interaktiven Optimierung integrierter Schaltungen” were published in very highranking international proceedings and scientific journals. In his dissertation he started from the recognition that the computer-aided dimensioning of integrated circuits on transistor level normally leads to a very bad conditioned optimization problem and that this aspect played the central role in solving this problem. Mr. Huss provided important contributions to this matter which were advanced in future activities of the chair and finally resulted in the establishment of a company. Today, 15 employees of the company MunEDA are busy with the production and the world-wide sale of software tools for the design of analog components in microchips.

In 1982, Mr. Huss changed from university to industry and then worked at the AEG Concern in several positions. At last he was responsible for the development and adoption of new design methods as well as for the long-term application of the corresponding design systems as a department manager at the development center Integrated Circuits. Design tools that were developed under his direction, were used not only in the AEG Concern but also in famous domestic and foreign companies for the development of microelectronic circuits and systems. Important cross-departmental functions and the preparation of publicly funded major research projects indicate that his professional and organizational skills were well appreciated. Despite his technical-economical aim and the surrounding circumstances of internal release procedures Mr. Huss was able to document the academic level of the activities in his field of work by publications and talks outside of the company, too.

One of these publications brought forth the award of the ITG in 1988, for one of the best publications of the year. After six years of university experience and eight years of employment in industry, Mr. Huss had proved to be a well appreciated and internationally accepted expert in the field of the computeraided design of integrated circuits and systems.