Peter Levin has been a professor, a research dean, a venture capitalist and an adviser to a sitting U.S. president. It's an unusual set of qualifications for launching an EDA startup, but it appears to have worked for Levin, the CEO of "design for debug" pioneer Dafca Inc.

"I like adventure," Levin said. His latest is Dafca, or Design Automation for Flexible Chip Architecture, a 30-person Framingham, Mass., design-for-debug startup that has raised $15 million in venture capital and won a $1.9 million grant from the Advanced Technology Program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Dafca is going into beta sites now with its ClearBlue software, which uses reconfigurable logic to insert instrumentation into ICs for postsilicon debug. Automating that slow and painful postsilicon process is a promising new market that may be worth $400 million to $500 million, Levin said. And beyond that, he noted, Dafca's reconfigurable "infrastructure fabric" has a wide range of potential applications, including performance modeling, power management and field diagnostics.

The company, which now has paying customers, has "enjoyed a very long run of good luck," Levin said. One could say the same about its CEO.

Levin received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 1988 and spent the next nine years at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he won a presidential "young investigator" award from then-President George H.W. Bush. He received his first academic appointment at age 26. Then, as a Humboldt Research fellow, he spent a year at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, doing research on wavelet expansion algorithms.

While in Germany in 1994, Levin heard about, and applied for, the White House fellowship program. Levin today considers himself "extraordinarily lucky" to have been accepted. "Very few engineering academics have ever applied, never mind getting through the rigorous qualifications," he told EE Times.

Levin was assigned to work in the Office of Management and Budget under Alice Rivlin in 1995. He attended staff meetings, participated in debriefings for senior Cabinet officials and conducted some research in energy, the environment and information technology. Levin was then asked to stay on for another year as a counselor to President Clinton, working under White House chief of staff Bill Curry.

Levin's impression of Clinton? "He is certainly one of the smartest, most naturally gifted people I've ever met," he said. "He had extraordinary recall and could synthesize widely disparate ideas. He would come to a sensible medium position that made a lot of people happy--until they thought about it later."

Levin helped draft Clinton's 1996 acceptance speech, but, more important, his job involved tutoring the president and his advisers on technology matters. "I could explain fundamental principles, like electric-power generation and transmission," he said. "Around the time of the telecommunications law [of 1996], I spent a lot of time explaining what a packet was.

"People were making impactful decisions on the economic or environmental burden of energy, but they might not have understood the basic physics," Levin said. "It was useful to have a guy like me around who could talk at almost any level."

After two years in the White House, Levin returned to academia as research dean at Boston University's College of Engineering. Then, in 1999, it was time for another abrupt switch: Levin, who is fluent in German, became a venture capitalist with Munich-based Techno Venture Management (TVM). "I tell people I trashed a perfectly good academic career to become a lowly investment manager in a sector I had no clue about," he said.