Mead–Conway VLSI chip design revolution
The Mead–Conway VLSI chip design revolution, or Mead and Conway revolution, was a very-large-scale integration (
A prominent factor in promoting this design revolution throughout industry was the DARPA-funded VLSI Project instigated by Mead and Conway which spurred development of electronic design automation.
Details
When the integrated circuit was originally invented and commercialized, the initial chip designers were co-located with the physicists, engineers and factories that understood integrated circuit technology. At that time, fewer than 100 transistors would fit in an integrated circuit "chip". The design capability for such circuits was centered in industry, with universities struggling to catch up. Soon, the number of transistors which fit in a chip started doubling every year[3] and since 1975 has been doubling every two years. Much more complex circuits could then fit on a single chip, but the device physicists who fabricated the chips were not experts in electronic circuit design, so their designs were limited more by their expertise and imaginations than by limitations in the technology.
In 1978–79, when approximately 20,000 transistors could be fabricated in a single chip,
An important milestone that followed was the
In 1980, the
References
- ^ OCLC 4641561.
- ^ Pios Labs (June 3, 2021) The Mead-Conway Revolution - Clip from The K12 Engineering Education Podcast
- ^ Moore, Gordon (April 19, 1965). "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits" (PDF). Intel.com. McGraw-Hill, Electronics Magazine. Retrieved 19 November 2020.
[...] by 1975 economics may dictate squeezing as many as 65,000 components on a single silicon chip
- ^ Conway, Lynn (August 12, 1979). "The MIT'78 VLSI System Design Course: A Guidebook for the Instructor of VLSI System Design" (PDF). Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
Further reading
- Conway, Lynn (16 November 2007). "Impact of the Mead-Conway innovations in VLSI chip design and implementation methodology".
- Conway, Lynn (2006). "The Mead-Conway VLSI Chip Design Revolution: An Annotated List of References". ai.eecs.umich.edu. Retrieved 2021-06-01.
- Conway, Lynn (November 1982) [1981]. "The MPC Adventures". Microprocessing and Microprogramming — the Euromicro Journal. 10 (4): 209–228. . Xerox PARC Technical Report VLSI-81-2.
- Gilder, George (1990). Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution In Economics And Technology. Free Press. ISBN 978-0-671-70592-3.
- Hiltzik, Michael A. (2000). Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. Harper Collins. ISBN 978-0-88730-989-2.