She worked at IBM in the 1960s and invented generalized dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by most modern computer processors to improve performance. She initiated the Mead–Conway VLSI chip design revolution in very large scale integrated (VLSI) microchip design. That revolution spread rapidly through the research universities and computing industries during the 1980s, incubating an emerging electronic design automation industry, spawning the modern 'foundry' infrastructure for chip design and production, and triggering a rush of impactful high-tech startups in the 1980s and 1990s.[6][7][8][9][10][11]
After learning of the pioneering research of Harry Benjamin in healthcare for transsexual women[18] and realising that gender affirmation surgery was now possible, Conway sought his help and became his patient. After suffering from severe depression from gender dysphoria, Conway contacted Benjamin, who agreed to provide counseling and prescribe hormones. Under Benjamin's care, Conway began her medical gender transition.[19]
While struggling with life in a male role,[19] Conway had been married to a woman and had two children. Under the legal constraints then in place, she was denied access to their children after transitioning.[19]
Although she had hoped to be allowed to transition on the job, IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she revealed her intention to transition.[20] IBM apologized for this in 2020.[21]
Career as computer scientist
Upon completing her transition in 1968, Conway took a new name and identity, and restarted her career in what she called "stealth-mode" as a contract programmer at Computer Applications, Inc. She went on to work at Memorex during 1969–1972 as a digital system designer and computer architect.[19][22]
Conway joined Xerox PARC in 1973, where she led the "LSI Systems" group under Bert Sutherland.[23][24] When in PARC, Conway founded the "multiproject wafers" (MPW). This new technology made it possible to pack multiple circuit designs from various sources into one single silicon wafer. Her new invention increased production and decreased costs.[25] Collaborating with Ivan Sutherland and Carver Mead of Caltech on VLSI design methodology, she co-authored Introduction to VLSI Systems, a groundbreaking work that would soon become a standard textbook in chip design, used in nearly 120 universities by 1983.[26][27][28][29] With over 70,000 copies sold, and the new integration of her MPC79/MOSIS innovations, the Mead and Conway revolution became part of VLSI design.[27][30]
In 1978, Conway served as visiting associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, teaching a now famous VLSI design course based on a draft of the Mead–Conway text.[19] The course validated the new design methods and textbook, and established the syllabus and instructor's guidebook used in later courses worldwide.[31][32]
Among Conway's contributions were the invention of dimensionless, scalable design rules that greatly simplified chip design and design tools,[7][13][33] and invention of a new form of internet-based infrastructure for rapid prototyping and short-run fabrication of large numbers of chip designs.[7][34] The problem they were solving was how to cope with the increasing complexity of chip design while the number of transistors per chip doubled every two years as Gordon Moore (chairman of Intel) had predicted in 1965. The design methods in use in the semiconductor industry were rapidly running out of steam.[35] The new infrastructure was institutionalized as the Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service (MOSIS) system in 1981. Two years into its success, Mead and Conway received Electronics magazine's annual award of achievement.[36] Since then, MOSIS has fabricated more than 50,000 circuit designs for commercial firms, government agencies, and research and educational institutions around the world.[37] VLSI researcher Charles Seitz commented that "MOSIS represented the first period since the pioneering work of Eckert and Mauchley on the ENIAC in the late 1940s that universities and small companies had access to state-of-the-art digital technology."[34]
The research methods used to develop the Mead–Conway VLSI design methodology and the MOSIS prototype are documented in a 1981 Xerox report[38] and the Euromicro Journal.[39] The impact of the Mead–Conway work is described in a number of historical overviews of computing.[34][40][41][42][43][44] Conway and her colleagues have compiled an online archive of original papers that documents much of that work.[45][46] The methods also came under ethnographic study in 1980 by PARC anthropologist Lucy Suchman, who published her interviews with Conway in 2021.[47][48]
In a USA Today article about Conway's joining DARPA, Mark Stefik, a Xerox scientist who worked with her, said "Lynn would like to live five lives in the course of one life" and that she's "charismatic and very energetic".[50] Douglas Fairbairn, a former Xerox associate, said "She figures out a way so that everybody wins."[50]
Conway joined the University of Michigan in 1985 as professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and associate dean of engineering. There she worked on "visual communications and control probing for basic system and user-interface concepts as applicable to hybridized internet/broadband-cable communications".[13] She retired from active teaching and research in 1998, as professor emerita at Michigan.[51]
Legacy
As sociologist Thomas Streeter discusses in The Net Effect:[52][53] "By taking this job, Conway was demonstrating that she was no antiwar liberal. (In response to critics, she has said, 'if you have to fight, and sometimes you must in order to deal with bad people, history tells us that it really helps to have the best weapons available)".[12] But Conway carried a sense of computers as tools for horizontal communications that she had absorbed at PARC right into DARPA – at one of the hottest moments of the cold war."
In the fall of 2012, the IEEE published a special issue of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine devoted to Lynn Conway's career,[54][55] including a career memoir by Conway[20] and peer commentaries by Chuck House,[56] former Director of Engineering at HP, Carlo Séquin, Professor of EECS at U.C. Berkeley,[57] and Ken Shepard, of Columbia University.[58] Subsequently the scope of Conway's contributions gained wider retrospective attention. "Since I didn't #LookLikeanEngineer, few people caught on to what I was really doing back in the 70s and 80s," says Conway.[21]
"Clearly a new paradigm had emerged ... Importantly, imaginative support in terms of infrastructure and idea dissemination proved as valuable as the concepts, tools, and chips. The "electronic book" and the "foundry" were both prescient and necessary, providing momentum and proof-points."[56]James F. "Jim" Gibbons, former dean of engineering at Stanford University, further states that Lynn Conway, from his perspective, "...was the singular force behind the entire 'foundry' development that emerged."[56]Kenneth Shepard, Professor of Biomedical and Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, stated that "Lynn's amazing story of accomplishment and personal triumph in the face of personal adversity and overt discrimination should serve as an inspiration to all young engineers."[58][59]
In 2020, NAE President John L. Anderson stated that "Lynn Conway is not only a revolutionary pioneer in the design of VLSI systems ... But just as important, Lynn has been very brave in telling her own story, and her perseverance has been a reminder to society that it should not be blind to the innovations of women, people of color, or others who don't fit long outdated – but unfortunately, persistent – perceptions of what an engineer looks like."[21]
Transgender activism
When nearing retirement, Conway learned that the story of her early work at IBM might soon be revealed through the investigations of Mark Smotherman that were being prepared for a 2001 publication.[6] She began quietly coming out in 1999 to friends and colleagues about her past gender transition,[60][61][62] using her personal website to tell the story in her own words.[12] Her story was then more widely reported in 2000 in profiles in Scientific American[14] and the Los Angeles Times.[19] In a later Forbes interview, Conway commented "From the 1970s to 1999 I was recognized as breaking the gender barrier in the computer science field as a woman, but in 2000 it became the transgender barrier I was breaking."[21]
After going public with her story, she began work in transgender activism, intending to "illuminate and normalize the issues of gender identity and the processes of gender transition".[63] She has worked to protect and expand the rights of transgender people. She has provided direct and indirect assistance to numerous other transgender women going through transition and maintains a website providing medical resources and emotional advice. Parts have been translated into most of the world's major languages.[64] She maintained a listing of many successful post-transition transgender people, to, in her words "provide role models for individuals who are facing gender transition".[65] Her website also provided news related to transgender issues and information on sex reassignment surgery for transsexual women, facial feminization surgery, academic inquiries into the prevalence of transsexualism[66] and transgender and transsexual issues in general.[67][68]
Conway has been a critic of the Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence theory of male-to-female transsexualism that all trans women are motivated either by feminine homosexuality or autogynephilia.[77] Along with American transgender rights activist Andrea James and University of Chicago economics professor Dierdre McCloskey, she was also a key person in the campaign against J. Michael Bailey's book about the theory, The Man Who Would Be Queen.[78][79] Conway and McCloskey wrote letters to Northwestern University, accusing Bailey of "conducting intimate research observations on human subjects without telling them that they were objects of the study."[77] American bioethicist Alice Dreger in her book Galilieo's Middle Finger criticized Conway for filing a lawsuit against Bailey which had "no legal basis", referring to her allegation that Bailey lacked a license as a clinical psychologist when he wrote letters in support of a young trans woman seeking to transition. According to Dreger, as Bailey did not receive compensation for his services, he would not have needed a license in Illinois, and was "completely forthright in his letters supporting the women, both about the fact that he had only had brief conversations with them (as opposed to having provided them with extensive counseling) and about his own qualifications and expertise... [and] even attached copies of his CV." As Dreger argues, "presumably all this was why [Illinois] never bothered to pursue the charge."[80] In response, Conway argued that Dreger "deflects attention away from Bailey's book and the massive trans community protest, and caricatures the entire controversy as nothing more than a vicious effort by three rather witch-like women to 'ruin the life' of a brilliant scientist.[81]
Conway was a cast member in the first all-transgender performance of The Vagina Monologues in Los Angeles in 2004,[82] and appeared in a LOGO-Channel documentary film about that event entitled Beautiful Daughters.[60][83]
In 2013, with support from many hi-tech thought-leaders, Conway and Leandra Vicci of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill lobbied the directors of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest professional engineering society, for transgender inclusion in the IEEE's code of ethics.[86] The code, known within the profession as much as a code of honor as one of ethics, became fully LGBT inclusive in January 2014.[87][88][89]
In 2014, Time Magazine named Conway as one of "21 Transgender People Who Influenced American Culture".[5]
In 2015, she was selected for inclusion in "The Trans100"[90] and was interviewed in 2020 for inclusion in the Trans Activism Oral History Project.[91]
Personal life
In 1987, Conway met her husband Charles "Charlie" Rogers, a professional engineer who shares her interest in the outdoors, including whitewater canoeing and motocross racing.[19][92] They soon started living together, and bought a house with 24 acres (9.7ha) of meadow, marsh, and woodland in rural Michigan in 1994.[19] On August 13, 2002, they were married.[15][60][93] In 2014, the University of Michigan's The Michigan Engineer alumni magazine documented the connections between Conway's engineering explorations and the adventures in her personal life.[94][95]
Awards and honors
Conway has received a number of awards and distinctions:
In 2020, 52 years after IBM fired her for being transgender, IBM officially and publicly apologized to Conway;[152][153][154][155][156][157] IBM held a public event "Tech Trailblazer and Transgender Pioneer Lynn Conway in conversation with Diane Gherson" (IBM's senior VP of HR); IBM's Director of Research Dario Gil said "Lynn was recently awarded the rare IBM Lifetime Achievement Award, given to individuals who have changed the world through technology inventions. Lynn's extraordinary technical achievements helped define the modern computing industry. She paved the way for how we design and make computing chips today – and forever changed microelectronics, devices, and people's lives."[145]
Conway, L. (September 23, 1982). "The Design of VLSI Design Methods"(PDF). Proc. VUB European Solid-State Circuits Conference (Invited Lecture). Vrije Universiteit Brüssel, Brussels, Belgium: 106–117.
US 5046022,Conway, Lynn; Volz, Richard& Walker, Michael,"Teleautonomous System and Method Employing Time/Position Synchrony/Desynchrony",issued September 3, 1991.
US 5444476,Conway, Lynn,"System and Method for Teleinteraction",issued August 22, 1995
US 5652849,Conway, Lynn&Cohen, Charles,"Apparatus and Method for Remote Control Using a Visual Information Stream",issued July 20, 1997
US 5719622,Conway, Lynn,"Visual Control Selection of Remote Mechanisms",issued February 17, 1998
US 5745782,Conway, Lynn,"Method and System for Organizing and Presenting Audio/Visual Information",issued April 28, 1998
Related Research Articles
An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip, computer chip, or simply chip, is a small electronic device made up of multiple interconnected electronic components such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors. These components are etched onto a small piece of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Integrated circuits are used in a wide range of electronic devices, including computers, smartphones, and televisions, to perform various functions such as processing and storing information. They have greatly impacted the field of electronics by enabling device miniaturization and enhanced functionality.
Very-large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions or billions of MOS transistors onto a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when MOS integrated circuit chips were developed and then widely adopted, enabling complex semiconductor and telecommunication technologies. The microprocessor and memory chips are VLSI devices.
Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), is a category of software tools for designing electronic systems such as integrated circuits and printed circuit boards. The tools work together in a design flow that chip designers use to design and analyze entire semiconductor chips. Since a modern semiconductor chip can have billions of components, EDA tools are essential for their design; this article in particular describes EDA specifically with respect to integrated circuits (ICs).
Gene Myron Amdahl was an American computer architect and high-tech entrepreneur, chiefly known for his work on mainframe computers at IBM and later his own companies, especially Amdahl Corporation. He formulated Amdahl's law, which states a fundamental limitation of parallel computing.
MOSIS is multi-project wafer service that provides metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) chip design tools and related services that enable universities, government agencies, research institutes and businesses to prototype chips efficiently and cost-effectively.
Carver Andress Mead is an American scientist and engineer. He currently holds the position of Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), having taught there for over 40 years.
The VLSI Project was a DARPA-program initiated by Robert Kahn in 1978 that provided research funding to a wide variety of university-based teams in an effort to improve the state of the art in microprocessor design, then known as Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI).
Multi-project chip (MPC), and multi-project wafer (MPW) semiconductor manufacturing arrangements allow customers to share tooling and microelectronics wafer fabrication cost between several designs or projects.
The Mead–Conway VLSI chip design revolution, or Mead and Conway revolution, was a very-large-scale integration (VLSI) design revolution starting in 1978 which resulted in a worldwide restructuring of academic materials in computer science and electrical engineering education, and was paramount for the development of industries based on the application of microelectronics.
Frances Elizabeth Allen was an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. Allen was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, and in 2006 became the first woman to win the Turing Award. Her achievements include seminal work in compilers, program optimization, and parallelization. She worked for IBM from 1957 to 2002 and subsequently was a Fellow Emerita.
A transistor computer, now often called a second-generation computer, is a computer which uses discrete transistors instead of vacuum tubes. The first generation of electronic computers used vacuum tubes, which generated large amounts of heat, were bulky and unreliable. A second-generation computer, through the late 1950s and 1960s featured circuit boards filled with individual transistors and magnetic-core memory. These machines remained the mainstream design into the late 1960s, when integrated circuits started appearing and led to the third-generation computer.
Oyekunle Ayinde "Kunle" Olukotun is a British-born Nigerian computer scientist who is the Cadence Design Systems Professor of the Stanford School of Engineering, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab. Olukotun is known as the “father of the multi-core processor”, and the leader of the Stanford Hydra Chip Multiprocessor research project. Olukotun's achievements include designing the first general-purpose multi-core CPU, innovating single-chip multiprocessor and multi-threaded processor design, and pioneering multicore CPUs and GPUs, transactional memory technology and domain-specific languages programming models. Olukotun's research interests include computer architecture, parallel programming environments and scalable parallel systems, domain specific languages and high-level compilers.
John Patrick Hayes is an Irish-American computer scientist and electrical engineer, the Claude E. Shannon Chair of Engineering Science at the University of Michigan. He supervised over 35 doctoral students, coauthored seven books and over 340 peer-reviewed publications. His Erdös number is 2.
Prabhu Goel is an Indian American researcher, entrepreneur and businessman, known for having developed the PODEM Automatic test pattern generation and Verilog hardware description language.
Massoud Pedram is an Iranian American computer engineer noted for his research in green computing, energy storage systems, low-power electronics and design, electronic design automation and quantum computing. In the early 1990s, Pedram pioneered an approach to designing VLSI circuits that considered physical effects during logic synthesis. He named this approach layout-driven logic synthesis, which was subsequently called physical synthesis and incorporated into the standard EDA design flows. Pedram's early work on this subject became a significant prior art reference in a litigation between Synopsys Inc. and Magma Design Automation.
Rob A. Rutenbar is an American academic noted for contributions to software tools that automate analog integrated circuit design, and custom hardware platforms for high-performance automatic speech recognition. He is Senior Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Pittsburgh, where he leads the university's strategic and operational vision for research and innovation.
Mingyan Liu is an electrical engineering and computer science professor, and the Peter and Evelyn Fuss Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Her research is in optimal resource allocation, sequential decision theory, incentive design, online learning, and modeling and mining of large scale Internet measurement data concerning cyber security. She was a co-founder of the cybersecurity scoring startup Quadmetrics in 2014. Quadmetrics was named a "2016 Cool Vendor in Risk Management" by Gartner, and was acquired by FICO in 2016.
Emily Mower Provost is a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan. She directs the Computational Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) Laboratory.
Prabhat Mishra is a Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering and a UF Research Foundation Professor at the University of Florida. Prof. Mishra's research interests are in hardware security, quantum computing, embedded systems, system-on-chip validation, formal verification, and machine learning.
Krishnendu Chakrabarty is an Indian-American electrical and computer engineer. He is the Fulton Professor of Microelectronics at Arizona State University Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. Before joining Arizona State, he was the John Cocke Distinguished Professor and was the Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University Pratt School of Engineering.
↑ Allocating Federal Funds for Science and Technology, by Committee on Criteria for Federal Support of Research and Development, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, National Research Council, National Academy Press, Washington DC, 1995, page 75.
↑ "100 years of engineering excellence". Archived from the original on June 15, 2002. Retrieved August 17, 2008.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link), Trinity Reporter, Trinity College, Hartford, CN, Winter 98.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.