Mead & Conway revolution

The Mead & Conway revolution was the development of VLSI design and prototyping within or for academic institutions, both for education and research, and consequently breeding new kinds of industries based on microelectronics applications.

Background

Early in the commercialization of integrated circuits, when chips had hundreds of transistors or less, microchip design was performed primarily by industry and co-located with manufacturing. Design knowledge was largely proprietary and the universities fell behind in their capability to design such systems. As predicted by Moore’s law the number of transistors per chip doubled every year, high circuit complexity led to a disjunction between device physics experts and design capability.^{[citation needed]} For this reason Carver Mead called throughout the 1970s for a separation of design from technology, in order to establish EDA as its own discipline developing its own methodologies. The breakdown is that technologists know how to fabricate smaller and faster transistors, and designers know how to coordinate the cooperation of thousands or millions of transistors.

Textbook

Around 1980 when about up to 20,000 transistors could be fabricated on a single chip, Mead and Lynn Conway wrote "Introduction to VLSI System Design" which sold well^{[quantify][citation needed]}: the first VLSI design textbook for non-technologists, which helped to demystify the planning of VLSI systems. This text increased the number of engineers capable of creating such chips. The authors intended "Introduction to VLSI Systems" to fill a gap in the literature and introduce all electrical engineering and computer science students to integrated system architecture. This textbook triggered a massive breakthrough in education.^{[citation needed]} Mead & Conway VLSI design courses spread to many universities. Many^[quantify] Computer Science and Electrical Engineering professors throughout the world^{[citation needed]} started teaching VLSI system design by using this textbook. Many^[quantify] of them also obtained a copy of Conway’s notes for her M.I.T. course in 1978, which included a collection of exercises.

Results

A milestone was the Multi Project Chip (MPC) service for fabricating the students’ design exercise chips and the researcher's prototype chips at reasonable cost. The first run was at Conway’s 1978 VLSI course at M.I.T. A few weeks after completion of their design the students had the fabricated prototype available for testing. Conway's improved Xerox PARC MPC VLSI implementation system and service was operated successfully for a dozen universities in late 1979. Conway's MPC technology was transferred to USC-ISI to become the foundation for the MOSIS System, which has been used and evolved since 1981 as a national infrastructure for fast-turnaround prototyping of VLSI chip designs by universities and researchers.

In 1980 DARPA began DoD's new VLSI research program to support extensions of this work, resulting in many university and industry researchers becoming involved in following up the Mead-Conway innovations. The Mead & Conway ideas rapidly spread around the world and many national Mead & Conway scenes have been organized, for instance the German multi-university E.I.S. project. The Mead & Conway revolution has also fostered the emerging Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry and other industries depending on EDA products.

References

• Impact of the Mead-Conway VLSI chip design innovations, and of the MOSIS service based on Lynn Conway's MPC-79 Prototype
• Lynn Conway: The MPC Adventures (Xerox PARC Tech. Report VLSI-81-2)
• Michael A. Hiltzik: Dealers of Lightning - Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (Paperback); Harper Collins, 2000