Rutenberg, David

Person

Rutenberg, David

n.d.

Dr. David P. Rutenberg studied Engineering Physics at the University of Toronto, then moved to San Francisco to work for Chevron Oil in the early days of big computers. He studied for an MBA and then PhD at the University of California (Berkeley), and became an Assistant, then Associate, Professor at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
After 16 years in the US, he returned to live in Canada in 1977. Queen’s University hired him to create courses in international business. He had been asked to be visiting professor of international business at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in 1982. So he wanted to get ready for this Silicon Valley experience by auditing a course in Electrical Engineering at Queen’s. His EE colleagues got him into an experimental seminar in which each student would actually design an integrated circuit chip, and have it manufactured for them at Nortel. That seminar became the nucleus for the Canadian Microelectronics Corporation (CMC), which for almost 20 years has assured that every university in Canada has commercial quality design equipment and software, and that the chip designs are manufactured at the best quality fabs in the world. David, in his involvement with CMC, tries to assure that intellectual-property practices that help academics make prototypes do not impede their subsequent commercialization. In 2001 he wrote a study for the Law Reform Commission of Canada on the possibility of banks making loans that would be secured by intellectual property.
Dr. Rutenberg retired from Queen’s in 2001.

Draft

• English