http://christineburns.podbean.com/2009/03/22/ada-lovelace-day-interview-lynn-conway/ Equality, Diversity and plain good sense for the noughties Wed, 25 Nov 2009 03:44:49 +0000 http://podbean.com/?v=3.2 http://christineburns.podbean.com/2009/03/22/ada-lovelace-day-interview-lynn-conway/#comment-199588 Sun, 22 Mar 2009 16:39:40 +0000 http://christineburns.podbean.com/2009/03/22/ada-lovelace-day-interview-lynn-conway/#comment-199588 Professor Lynn Conway's innovations were key to the emergence of Very Large Scale Integrated system technology and to my own career. In 1980, I designed custom integrated circuits in Hewlett-Packard’s Disc (spelled with a “c”) Memory Division, as HP realigned its design methodologies using the text, Introduction to VLSI Systems, that Lynn coauthored with Dr. Carver Mead. Their adaptation of hierarchical design decomposition from the software world made unprecedented levels of functional complexity manageable in silicon. HP soon became the primary fabrication provider for the MOSIS rapid prototyping service, which was proposed by Lynn, using her Multi-Project Chip scheme. These innovations revolutionized the teaching of microelectronics design, enabling hands-on implementation in small, rural universities as well as major institutions. I helped bring a VLSI curriculum to the University of Idaho in the early 80s and established a new program at Montana State University a few years later. The former became the NASA Space Engineering Research Center for Microelectronics, established by Dr. Gary Maki with funding from the Goddard Space Flight Center. I continued to use the Mead-Conway text in my graduate and undergraduate classes for over a decade. Back at HP in the late 1990s, I worked alongside some of my former students on the Intel Itanium-2 processor. The world’s most advanced computing machine of the new millennium was enabled by many of the design principles advanced by Professor Conway many years earlier. Professor Lynn Conway’s innovations were key to the emergence of Very Large Scale Integrated system technology and to my own career. In 1980, I designed custom integrated circuits in Hewlett-Packard’s Disc (spelled with a “c”) Memory Division, as HP realigned its design methodologies using the text, Introduction to VLSI Systems, that Lynn coauthored with Dr. Carver Mead. Their adaptation of hierarchical design decomposition from the software world made unprecedented levels of functional complexity manageable in silicon. HP soon became the primary fabrication provider for the MOSIS rapid prototyping service, which was proposed by Lynn, using her Multi-Project Chip scheme. These innovations revolutionized the teaching of microelectronics design, enabling hands-on implementation in small, rural universities as well as major institutions. I helped bring a VLSI curriculum to the University of Idaho in the early 80s and established a new program at Montana State University a few years later. The former became the NASA Space Engineering Research Center for Microelectronics, established by Dr. Gary Maki with funding from the Goddard Space Flight Center. I continued to use the Mead-Conway text in my graduate and undergraduate classes for over a decade. Back at HP in the late 1990s, I worked alongside some of my former students on the Intel Itanium-2 processor. The world’s most advanced computing machine of the new millennium was enabled by many of the design principles advanced by Professor Conway many years earlier.

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