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 (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.