Mead-Conway VLSI design approach and system design challenges ahead

What should the students of today be learning and doing to prepare them for system design 10 years from now? What will be the biggest challenges facing them at that time? Then too, where are the biggest opportunities for research impact right now? To help us think about such questions, we'll look back 25 years and reflect on some lessons from the early VLSI adventures of the late 70's. We'll see how separate disciplines were merged to create a new, simplified design methodology. We'll see how QTA implementation provided students and researchers with means to rapidly explore new design spaces opened by these methods. And we'll look at how a unique university/industry/government collaboration supported and motivated all these explorations. Looking ahead, we'll speculate about whether we might be at a similar "break-point" in complexity and system design challenges, and about the possibility that new innovations in system design could re-revolutionize microelectronics.