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It would be difficult to compete with the answer by Pasquale Ferrara, if only b/c of sheer size and the amount of detail :) However, since the question was about the best VLSI CAD research groups in US universities, let me comment on those I consider the best.Berkeley, MIT and CMU appear "top-heavy" --- the senior researchers are by far more prominent than junior researchers. In comparison, the Michigan EDA group is more balanced. For example, if you look at the list of the winners of ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award and the IEEE CEDA Early Career Award, you will see 4 wins for Michigan, 2 for Illinois, one for Stanford, MIT, Columbia, Rice, UCLA, and some others. None for Berkeley so far. There might be a recent CMU winner not mentioned there yet.In terms of past glory and bragging rights, I agree that Berkeley is the indisputable leader in EDA. In addition to A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli and A.R.Newton helping found Cadence and Synopsys, don't forget Kurt Keutzer, who used to be the CTO of Synopsys before moving to Berkeley and is, perhaps, most accessible to graduate students now. Bob Brayton - another legend - has recently retired (but is still active). At MIT, of the two experts in numerical simulation and model-order reduction, the more senior professor (J.White) has been looking into biomedical applications (not really EDA). Other highly respected people took administrative positions for a while (S.Devadas was division chair), which limited the time spent on research and advising. At CMU, Randy Bryant has been the Engineering Dean.At Michigan, EDA people have also helped with university administration (M.Papaefthymiou is current CSE division chair, S.Director was the Engineering Dean) and there are many Michigan alums in the EDA industry (Wally Rhines is the CEO of Mentor Graphics), but we have significantly more active young and mid-career faculty at both CSE and ECE (in contrast, at Berkeley, most of the EDA is at EE) working on anything from memristor EDA and 3D integration to verification and GPU-based EDA. The EDA group at UIUC is also fairly balanced, but perhaps not as broad and interconnected. In general, at any university, professors tend to change their focus every now and then, or even move somewhere else (Rutenbar moved from CMU to Illinois, M. D.F.Wong moved from UT Austin to Illinois, Henzinger moved from Berkeley to Europe, Roychowdhury moved from Minnesota to Berkeley, R.P.Dick moved from Northwestern to Michigan, Wisconsin lost C.C.P.Chen and L.He) so you should check specific professors and their recent publications. Also, check with their students how much time their professor spends in town (in some cases, surprisingly little time). At some universities (Stanford), very few EDA professors take new students at any given time, so you could be competing for the attention of 1-2 professors with many other students and may not have many choices of topic areas. At other universities (Michigan), the EDA groups are broader, and the professors sometimes compete for good students, co-advise them, and/or allow rotations between labs.For particular subfields of EDA, it is often clear where you want to go. For example, for physical design, it'd be UT Austin, UCSD, UCLA, Michigan, GA Tech, Minnesota, Illinois and Texas A&M --- in no particular order. For logic synthesis, Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan and Columbia (maybe USC). For high-level synthesis, UCLA, Berkeley, MIT, Columbia, Princeton (possibly UCI, Michigan and CMU). For embedded systems, Berkeley, GA Tech, UCSD, UCI, GA Tech and possibly Michigan. For verification and validation - CMU, Berkeley, Stanford, or Michigan. For numerical methods and simulation, Berkeley or MIT. For topics related to semiconductor manufacturing, UT Austin, Illinois, UCSD, UCLA (possibly Michigan). EDA for emerging technologies --- Stanford, Michigan, Purdue, Princeton, Santa Barbara (depending on your specific focus). For secure hardware, Rice, Michigan, Stanford, possibly other schools. For circuit and system test, Stanford, UT Austin, Michigan, Santa Barbara, and Duke. For asynchronous logic CAD - Cornell and Columbia. For FPGA CAD - UCLA or Toronto (maybe Berkeley). For low-power CAD, consider USC, CMU, UCLA and Michigan - depending on the specific focus. For some topics, like analog circuit CAD, there are no obvious "go to" places for various reasons, and you really have to check with specific professors as to what they are working on these days. If you are interested in something I have not mentioned, name the area in comments. Keep in mind that Michigan, Berkeley, Stanford, Illinois and MIT also have top-notch computer-architecture and VLSI groups -- this is a big deal if you care about interdisciplinary research.In any case, in Pasquale Ferrara's list, I would move Illinois, UCLA, UCSD, USC and Minnesota quite a bit higher, and Northwestern U quite a bit lower. While MIT and Cornell are fine universities and their EDA groups have done a lot of good research, I'd move them lower in the list to better reflect their current activity level.Hope this helps.

As a high school senior, you can apply the screenwriting program at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, just as you would apply to any school. If you’re already enrolled at USC or elsewhere, you can also apply to transfer into the program, although my understanding is that it is EXTREMELY competitive to get in this way. (And getting in the first way is no cake walk either.)The full application process is described here: USC Cinematic Arts | Freshmen Application ProceduresBut before you hurry over, let me just take a quick minute of your time to say something you need to hear:Going through USC’s screenwriting program as an undergrad is almost certainly a giant waste of money.I went through USC’s MFA program, and I met a number of the undergrads in my time there. They seemed like smart, high functioning people, but most of them were wasting their time and, not coincidentally, a LOT of money (enrolling in 2017 for four years will run you $279,800 according to the USC website.)Why? Because a writer needs things to write about. Most writers look to their personal experiences to find inspiration: the things that interest them, the moments in their lives that resonated for them, the people they’ve met and events they’ve lived through.Most high school seniors have only lived through being a kid and most of being a teenager. They probably haven’t voted. They’re not allowed to legally drink. Even if they’re patriotic, they haven’t served in the military yet. And in the vast majority of cases, they’ve been raised and cared for by at least one full-time parent.Now, at 18, that feels like a lot — and it is, compared to, say, what a 12-year-old knows about the world. But the kind of art you can create, the kind of stories you can tell, with just 18 years worth of experience on this planet, are largely pretty simple.I saw this, over and over, with the USC undergrads — they were very, very capable, but they had very little life experience to pull from. They had one or two significant others. They’d lived in their parents’ houses, their dorms, maybe one off-campus apartment. They only knew enough about the world and being alive to tell the kind of stories that are interesting to other 18–21 year olds. Also, biologically, they were 18–21; their brains were still an impulsive stew of hormones and neurochemicals. They didn’t know who *they* were yet, which made it that much harder for them to discern what kinds of stories they wanted to tell, and how.If you love writing, if you want to tell stories, do the hard work of finding things to tell stories about. Film school will always be there for you, when you’re ready. Personally, I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an undergrad and it hurt me not at all when I started on my career. It was also cheap enough that I could take a whole bunch of unrelated classes, and the student body was pretty diverse, because it wasn’t so expensive that no one but rich kids could afford it. Not to mention, I didn’t have major student loans to pay off after graduation.Are there ANY exceptions to the above? Yes. If you have served in the military, if you’ve faced a life-threatening illness or a traumatic personal or family experience (and by that, I don’t mean your parents are divorced; I mean death, deportation, growing up with political strife, bankruptcy, etc.), then the whole “inexperienced 18-year-old” thing probably doesn’t apply to you. And that unusual personal experience also means you’re a likely candidate for significant financial aid, so sure, go ahead and apply — USC can always benefit from more applicants from diverse backgrounds.

Question: “How was it possible that a family could be supported comfortably on a single income in, for example, the 1950s, yet today people struggle with two incomes?”OK. having actually lived in the 1950s and disagreeing with many of the posted answers I will have to answer this, giving real and verifiable examples. In particular, I must respond to an extremely inaccurate and misleading answer posted by Quora writer Heather Johnson.To put things in perspective, I grew up in southeastern and south central Wisconsin. My father was an engineer, i.e., he had a modest middle class income. My mother, although she had worked before marriage, was a housewife and parent without outside income. The family consisted of my parents and six children, all of whom went to college. Everything about our lives was normal mid-western, middle class.Johnson writes: “[A]ppliances were bought on 5yr hire purchase plans. Once you paid it off you kept it for 20 yrs”. NO. Just no!My parents paid cash for every appliance purchase, as did most people in the middle class. Credit cards, other than American Express and Diner’s Club, both for business use, did not exist. Consumer credit did not exist, other than time payments from Sears if you bought their Kenmore brand and small loans at bad terms from Household Finance stores which catered to the improvident. Sensible people never borrowed money. Other than gas cards, there were no non-business credit cards in the 1950s and ‘60s. No one had ever heard the term “Master Card” or the phrase “Minimum Monthly Payment”.Appliances, although well made and, unlike today, designed so that they could be serviced, seldom lasted for “20 years”. A heavily used automatic washing machine or dryer might last 5 to 7 years. A kitchen range might be kept for 10 years, after which maintenance issues involving heating elements, clocks, timers, and switches made replacement likely. Automatic dishwashers and garbage disposers and garage door openers all had limited life spans. Tube type televisions in the 1950s ran hot, needed frequent service, and lasted no more than 5 years before needing to be replaced.Johnson writes: “Houses were small…a kitchen resembling a walk-in closet.”NO. This is the house my family lived in in the 1950s.It had a very large kitchen, a separate formal dining room, a living room with masonry fireplace, 3 large bedrooms all with closets, a closed in porch, solid oak floors throughout, a full basement, a cedar shingle roof, and a separate garage, all on a large wooded lot on a quiet street. The quality throughout was far higher than that which one can buy today. There were two Bell System dial telephones, one in a telephone alcove in the dining room and one in my parent’s bedroom.It was a typical middle class home.In 1962 my father had this built.It had a large kitchen, with a dish washer (!), formal dining room, living room, two masonry fireplaces, family room, office, laundry room, four large bedrooms, 2 and ½ baths, hardwood floors, full finished basement (with a bar and a pool table), two car attached garage, patio, breezeway, all on a two acre wooded lot with a view. Again there were two dial telephones, one of which was in my parent’s bedroom. This was a very typical home for a middle class salaried employee. In the 1950s American middle class families did not live in tiny shacks.Johnson claims that Americans in the 1950s: “[B]ought one car and maintained it for decades.” NO! Cars did not last for “decades”.In the 1950s a car was considered old at 60,000 miles when it was traded in on a new model. It was unheard of to own a car whose odometer had turned over from 99,999 to 0. The odometers did not even have a 100,000 mile dial. Most people traded in their cars every 3 to at most 5 years. Many car guys had arrangements with their car dealer wherein they would trade in their car every 2 years for a new version of the same make and model for a fixed amount of money. These are some of the cars my father owned in the 1950s. Note the upward mobility shown by the car models over the years.And from 1958 on, like many middle class American families, we had two cars, one for my father and the other shared by my mother and the children. They always paid cash for their cars, regarding auto loans as wasteful.This was my mother’s car.Johnson writes: “You had a modest closet consisting of one Sunday best outfit, 2 work outfits and 2 casual outfits.NO! My father wore suits to work and casual slacks and golf shirts on the golf course. I never saw him in a t-shirt or a pair of jeans. My mother dressed nicely, owned a few outfits by Dior and Balenciaga and Chanel and had a seldom worn mink stole. Although she knew how to dress well, this was not unusual or extravagant for the wife of a salaried engineer. In the 1950s and ’60s one dressed up to go shopping downtown or out to dinner or take an airline flight.Johnson claimed: “You ate out infrequently”.Not exactly. Fast food joints did not exist. Nor did family casual restaurants, aside from Italian pizzerias or the Friday fish fry at the neighborhood bar. Families seldom went out to dinner with the children. But my father frequently took my mother out on Friday nights to a nice supper club with dancing afterwards.My family in the 1950s lived this way while my parents, after having struggled through the depression and war years, paid off a mortgage, paid for parochial school for the children, sent six children to college, had no debt, and invested enough money in the stock market to be well off in retirement. Unlike what Johnson implies, the American middle class in the 1950s did not live in some sort of austere deprived poverty.OK, how was that possible? The economic system of the post-war period was different.Unlike today where all of the gains in productivity in the economy are directed to the 1%, from 1945 to 1980 productivity gains were shared and enjoyed by all segments of the working classes.Employment was secure. If you were employed and did your job well you did not have to worry that you would lose your job to a KKR or Bain Capital leveraged buyout scheme or some balance sheet manipulator’s desire to create paper “share holder value” or enhance his own stock options. The term “down sizing” had not been thought of. Looting of pension funds, a standard tactic of leveraged buyouts today, would have been a criminal offense in the 1950s and 1960s..The forty hour week was the norm. Workers were not expected to either work when they were not being paid or take work home. Blue collar workers got overtime for anything beyond 8 hours per day or 40 hours per week. And that overtime was enough to allow my wife’s machinist father to pay off the mortgage of a new house in five years.Medical costs were reasonable. Hospitals were run by religious orders or owned by municipalities, not predatory corporations. The cost of having a baby, including days recovering in a pleasant sun lit room, was ~$250.Companies paid good wages and salaries and all good companies included medical insurance and defined benefit pensions.Employment included paid vacation time.Unions insured safe working conditions and good wages for working men. In the 1950s more than 30% of the jobs were unionized. (Today that figure is 11%, and most of those are public employees, i.e., cops and teachers.) Those union wages set a floor that kept up the wages of non-union workers and white collar employees.Union Pensions allowed comfortable retirements. I will describe for example the work and retirement history of a friend with whom we discussed work in the 1960s yesterday: Went to work in the late 1960s immediately after high school for an automobile manufacturer. Worked as a sweeper, i.e., a janitor. Retired after 30 years, and not yet 50 years old, on generous full pension. Pension includes excellent medial coverage from Kaiser-Permanente. Has been retired for 20 years. Owns, for personal use, a home in Florida and a condominium in Colorado, and farm land in Wisconsin. Travels.The public schools were good and staffed with good teachers. The courses included typing and secretarial skills and mechanical trades as well as academics. Thus, students graduated prepared either for college or for a trade.The cost of higher education was reasonable and a college education was easily affordable, especially at one of the excellent land grant universities, by anyone in the middle class or skilled blue collar class who qualified.Savings and Loan Associations and the post-war GI Bill offered affordable home mortgages while not lending either to speculators or those who were trying to live beyond their means, thus adding to both the growth and stability of home ownership. For a fixed rate 20 year mortgage the interest rate was ~4.5% in the 1950s and ~5.5% in the 1960s.Public transportation was better and far more extensive than today, offering an alternative to private cars.Work was closer to home seriously reducing commuting time and expenses for those who chose to drive to work.Americans who were adults in the 1950s had lived through the Great Depression. That taught those who were intelligent the value of savings and the danger of debt. Thus, they avoided consumer loans, paid cash for appliances and cars, put a large down payment on their homes, paid off mortgages quickly, lived within their means, and saved and/or invested.Finally, one must not forget that in the 1950s, because much of Europe had not yet recovered from the devastation of the war, American industry was given an extremely profitable decade and the American dollar was substantially overvalued making imports of goods to the United States, or travel by Americans to Europe, extremely inexpensive.The 1950s and 1960s were different. The American middle class in those decades did not live simple austere pleasureless lives. Nor did they lack nice things. But the difference was caused: 1) by a “Depression Mentality” which taught those who experienced the depression to avoid the debt trap, and 2) by structural differences in government regulations, differences in the tax system and who it was designed to serve, differences in business ethics, and differences in the economy. The different type of government in the 1950s and ’60s and different economy in that era allowed middle class families in the 1950s and 1960s to live nicely on one earner’s salary.As Quora writer Denis O’Sullivan said in the comments (see below): “ The old tradition of the poor getting poorer returned in the 1980′s. It was a good run from 1940 to about 1980 for both blue and white collar employees.”Note re wages and prices in the 1950s: In 1957 the Federal Minimum Wage was $1.00 per hour. Adjusted simply for inflation that would be $9.20 today. The Georgia State Minimum Wage today is $5.15…half of what adjusted for inflation the Federal Minimum Wage was in 1957. The median income for an engineer with 10 years experience in 1957 was $10,000. Beginning pharmacists earned $125 per week or $6,500 per year. In 1955 the median income of a physician in general practice was $15,000. In 1957 a classroom teacher in a city of 50,000 earned $4,500 per year. The hourly wage for an automobile assembly line worker worker was $2.27 per hour, for a tool and die worker $2.95 per hour or $118 for a 40 hour week. The price for the 1950 Ford Deluxe V8 shown in the above photos was ~ $1,100. The 1953 Nash Ambassador sold for $3,100, the 1958 Oldsmobile $4,200. The two story colonial house shown in the photos sold for $17,500 in 1957. It was originally built in 1937. The 1962 house with attached garage was built for $34,000. In 1950 an Admiral black and white console television with radio and phonograph cost $500. In 1954 a top-of-the-line Admiral Dual-Temp two door refrigerator-freezer cost ~$500.Note re union wages in the 1950s: In unionized plants workers were paid time and one-half for hours worked over 40 hours per week and double time for working on holidays. Overtime was available based on seniority. My wife’s father was a skilled machinist at an automobile plant. Having started his employment there as a young man before enlisting in WWII, he was one of the 6 most senior employees in a factory of thousands of workers. He, thus, could bid for and get well paid overtime work whenever he wanted. One year he worked every day of the week including Saturdays and Sundays and Holidays for at least 8 hours per day, taking off only for one day, Christmas. By doing so he paid off the mortgage on a new home in five years. The UAW Pension allowed one to retire after 30 years regardless of age at full pension. That pension included full medical coverage including eyeglasses and dental care.Note re charge plates: The embossed aluminum charge pates issued by some department stores,gasoline station charge plates, Diners’ Club cards, and American Express cards used in the 1950s and ’60s were not credit cards as we use the terms today. These cards had to be paid off in full monthly. Diners’ Club and American Express cards, which were printed on paper with typed in names and addresses, were for business, not personal, use and were only available to the trustworthy and wealthy.Note that the above card from 1955 is described as a CREDIT IDENTIFICATION CARD. It was a card that informed the merchant that the holder’s income and reputation for paying his bills had been verified. Merchants and restaurants who accepted charge card placed the sticker(s) for the card(s) they accepted on the entry door. But you could not trust that. Restaurant owners would terminate their contract with the credit card issuer without removing those stickers.Department store plates could only be used at one store or one association of stores. They were often limited to a relatively small amount, often $50 or less. These were in use into the 1970s. Gas station cards, of course, could only be used at named gas stations. Sears did offer a “Revolving Credit Account” to holders of its charge cards. But these, again, could only be used for purchases at Sears stores. The Sears Roebuck and Co. card eventually became the Discover Card. The first actual Credit Card was the Master Card. (known as Interbank from 1966–1969 and Master Charge from 1969–1979). The first Interbank Cards were issued in 1958 to a restricted group. Charge Cards were not widely distributed until well into the 1970s. And even in the ’70s one had to check with restaurant servers before ordering to determine if your card or any card was valid at that restaurant. Many businesses refused to accept charge card purchases below a set amount.As late as the 1970s women desiring a Department Store Charge Plate had to get it in their husband’s name and the application needed his approval and signature, regardless of the wife’s employment or income. My wife encountered this when she applied for an account at Charles A. Stevens, a woman’s fine clothing store in the Chicago Loop, and was told she needed my approval and signature although she had a better job and higher salary than I did!Note re Changes in Relative Costs: In the 1960s my best friend’s father was a factory worker at the big dirty, but unionized, Fairbanks-Morse plant. My blue collar family friend could afford to take flying lessons and, before he was allowed to drive a car, had a private pilot’s license and enough flying hours by the time we were in high school to have both an instrument rating and a dual engine rating.As teenagers we were allowed and could afford to rent and fly aircraft, usually a Cessna, over Southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois, sometimes taking our dates out for night flights. We were high school students, and we paid for those flights with our own earnings from part time or summer jobs. Today flying lessons and airplane rentals are only available to the rich.Life was very different in the 1950s and 1960s.