The MPC Adventures: Experiences with the Generation of VLSI Design and Implementation Methodologies*

During the early '70's, Carver Mead began a pioneering series of courses in integrated circuit design at Caltech, presenting the basics of industry MOS design practice at the time. Observing some of the students' successes in later doing projects using these basics, Mead sensed that it might be possible to create new, much simpler methods of IC design than those then used in industry. In the mid '70's, Carver Mead and Lynn Conway, and their research groups at Caltech and Xerox, began a collaboration to search for improved, simplified methods for VLSI system design. They hoped to create methods that could be very easily learned by digital system designers, but that would also allow to full architectural potential of silicon to be realized. Their research yielded important basic results during '76 and '77. In the summer of '77, they began writing the textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems, to document the new methods. In the late '70's, Lynn Conway realized the need for largescale experimentation to further generate, test, and validate the methods. Conway began using novel methods within a systematic, rapidly expanding set of interactions with many universities throughout the United States. Students at these schools took courses using the evolving textbook, and then did design projects as part of those courses. The projects were implemented, and the resulting feedback was used to extend, refine, and debug the text, the courses, the university design environments, and the new design methods. As a result of the research methodology used, and the very large scale of the interactions with the university community (via computer-communications networks), the Mead-Conway design methods evolved unusually rapidly, going from concept to integration within industry in just a few years. This talk tells the story of these events, focussing on the research methods used to generate, validate, and culturally integrate the Mead-Conway design methods.