Mead & Conway Revolution

The term Mead & Conway revolution stands for the VLSI design revolution which had an immense impact by a world-wide restructuring of academic education, and, by being the breeding ground for new kinds of industries based on microelectronics application. Immediately after invention and commercialization of the integrated circuit, when only a hundred or less transistors have been on a chip, the design has been co-located with integrated circuit technology. All the circuit design capability was mainly in the hands of industry, and the universities fell behind in their capability to design computers and systems. But as predicted by Moore’s law the number of transistors which fit on a chip doubled every year, so that because of the high circuit complexity more and more the device physics experts have not really been well qualified. 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 the technologists know how to fabricate smaller and faster transistors, and the designers know how to coordinate the cooperation of thousands or millions of transistors.

Around 1980 when about up to 20,000 transistors could be fabricated on a single chip, Carver Mead and Lynn Conway came up with a new kind of textbook "Introduction to VLSI System Design“ which has been a bestseller: the first VLSI design textbook for non-technologists, which helped to demystify the planning of very large scale integrated (VLSI) systems. This text expanded the ranks 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. Mead & Conway VLSI design courses spread to many universities. Many Computer Science and Electrical Engineering professors throughout the world started teaching VLSI system design by using this textbook. Many of them also obtained a copy of Lynn Conway’s notes for her famous M.I.T. course in 1978, which included a valuable collection of exercises.

An important milestone has been the Multi Project Chip (MPC) service for fabricating the students’ design exercise chips and the researcher's prototype chips at reasonable cost. The first successful run of it has been demonstrated at Lynn Conway’s 1978 VLSI design course at M.I.T. A few weeks after completion of their design the students had the fabricated prototype in their hands, available for testing. Lynn Conway's improved new Xerox PARC MPC VLSI implementation system and service was operated successfully for a dozen universities already in late 1979. Lynn 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 top-rate university and industry researchers becoming involved in following up the Mead-Conway innovations. The Mead & Conway revolution rapidly spread around the world and many national Mead & Conway scenes have been organized, like for instance the German multi university E.I.S. project. The Mead & Conway revolution has also been a trailblazer, not only for an educational revolution at academia, but also of the growth of the emerging Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry and other industries depending on EDA products.