NSF-IC-EDUCATION.COM

Chip design at US universities blossomed on account of the Mead and Conway Revolution (Conway). In 1978-79, Carver Mead and Lynn Conway wrote the seminal textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems (Mead). This book offered abstractions that transformed digital chip design from a complex physics problem into a much easier computer science problem and popularized chip design in academia. Conway also taught a VLSI course at MIT in 1978 leading to the Multi-Project Chip concept, and Danny Cohen established the Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service (MOSIS) at USC for VLSI prototyping. MOSIS fabricated free chips for university VLSI classes, initially with NSF support and later with profits from their commercial operations, but ceased offering this service in 2020. DARPA also kicked off a VLSI research project in 1980, popularizing Mead & Conway's work and encouraging the development of chips and electronic design automation (EDA) tools... US academic integrated circuit (IC) design..