Publication of "Introduction to VLSI Systems"

In 1978, Lynn Conway, together with Caltech professor Carver Mead, published Introduction to VLSI Systems, a textbook that would transform how integrated circuits were designed and taught around the world.

The book codified a set of scalable, simplified design rules for very-large-scale integration (VLSI) circuits that abstracted away much of the complex physics and fabrication detail previously required of chip designers. This allowed engineers, and even students with limited fabrication experience, to design complex integrated circuits using a standardized, portable methodology—an innovation that came to be known as the Mead–Conway revolution.

Conway had developed and refined these methods while working at Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s, and she pioneered their use as a teaching tool, notably through a rapid-prototyping course she taught at MIT in 1978 that allowed students to design chips that were then fabricated and returned to them within weeks—an almost unheard-of turnaround at the time.

The textbook's impact was immense: it was adopted by dozens of universities within just a few years, catalyzing a massive expansion in the number of trained VLSI chip designers globally and directly enabling the rise of the fabless semiconductor industry. It remains one of the most influential texts in the history of electrical engineering education, and its methodologies underpin chip design practices still in use today.