The heritage of mead & conway: what has remained the same, what has changed, what was missed, and what lies ahead [point of view]

I was an undergraduate student when I read Introduction to VLSI Systems [1] for the first time, in the early 1980s; most likely a copy brought to Italy by Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli on the occasion of one of his summer visits to the Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy); ‘‘the book’’ introduced me to a world full of new ideas, and contributed to changing the voyage of my life, from mathematics and computer programming to electronic design automation (EDA). At that time, the students at the Electrical Engineering Department, Politecnico di Milano, were using KIC, a lambda-rules-based polygon layout editor devised by Giles Billingsley and Kenneth Keller, two Ph.D. students of Prof. Richard Newton at the University of California Berkeley (Berkeley, CA, USA) [2]. Running under UNIX BSD 4.1 on a Digital VAX 11/780 with a Ramtek 6211 Colorgraphics terminal, KIC was one of the first EDA tools inspired by Mead & Conway’s methods, and was used to contribute designs to multiproject chips (MPCs) to be manufactured by STMicroelectronics, then SGS Microelettronica (Geneva, Switzerland), acting as a foundry service for various Italian universities and research centersV another of Mead & Conway’s ideas that had quickly crossed the ocean. I joined STMicroelectronics Central R&D in 1985 to work on one of the first commercial incarnations of physical implementation. I reread ‘‘the book’’ during summer 2012 while working on a customer presentation, and I thought that Mead & Conway’s methods still looked incredibly modern. I wondered what had really changed in the last 30 years, if anything; whether there were fundamental misses in Mead & Conway’s methods; and if and how they could help address the grand challenges and the ‘‘red bricks’’ that lay ahead. These thoughts inspired me to organize a special session at the DATE 2013 conference in Grenoble, France. Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/JPROC.2013.2295871 Fig. 1. AGC logic module, detail (source: NASA).