Lynn Conway is an American computer scientist best known for co-leading the revolution in chip design that bears her name alongside Carver Mead. Working at Xerox PARC in the late 1970s, she helped turn integrated circuit design from a specialist craft into a structured, teachable discipline, and she invented organizational mechanisms that let many designers share the cost of fabrication.
Earlier in her career, while at IBM Research in the 1960s, Conway worked on an advanced supercomputer project and contributed to the invention of generalized dynamic instruction scheduling, a technique for issuing multiple instructions out of order to keep a processor’s units busy. That idea later became foundational to superscalar processor design, though her early role in it went largely unacknowledged for decades.
At PARC she devised the multi-project chip and the design infrastructure behind it, packing many separate designs onto a shared wafer run so that students and small teams could afford to fabricate real silicon. This service, which grew into MOSIS, separated the act of designing a chip from manufacturing it and made chip design broadly accessible. She also co-wrote and was a principal author of the 1980 textbook “Introduction to VLSI Systems,” which carried the new methodology into universities.
In her firsthand memoir “Reminiscences of the VLSI Revolution,” published in the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine, Conway tells the story in her own words, framing the breakthrough as one that grew out of a chain of earlier failures and describing how the methodology was built, taught, and proven. The Computer History Museum holds her donated collection, including draft copies of the textbook and the MPC79 multi-project-chip course materials, a primary record of the work.
In her later years Conway became a prominent advocate, sharing her own life story publicly to support others and writing extensively about both the technical history of the VLSI revolution and her personal experience. She remained an active voice in documenting and explaining the work that reshaped how chips are designed.