• DOI:10.1109/JPROC.2013.2295871
• Corpus ID: 17364160

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

@article{CasaleRossi2014TheHO,
  title={The heritage of mead \& conway: what has remained the same, what has changed, what was missed, and what lies ahead [point of view]},
  author={Marco Casale-Rossi},
  journal={Proc. IEEE},
  year={2014},
  volume={102},
  pages={114-119}
}

• M. Casale-Rossi
• Published 20 January 2014
• Art
• Proc. IEEE

I was an undergraduate student when I read Introduction to VLSI Systems (Mead and Conway, 1979) 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). 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.