[TUHS] Re: Circuit design tool mentioned in AT&T Unix promotion

I got an answer from Steve Johnson himself. He didn't keep up with the TUHS mailing list and is not sure whether he could post here currently -- so he asked me to post his answer here. He wrote an outline of what he remembers. Without some archived data from 40 years ago, this might be all, which could be known about this "L-Gen" tool. Thank you, Steve! Steve Johnson's answer >>>>> The Bell Labs Mead Conway Course Steve Johnson In the early 1980’s, semiconductor technology was a very hot topic. At that time I was a department head and recruited at CalTech, where Carver Mead taught a class that allowed students to design nMOS chips and get them fabricated and then test the hardware. My boss, Sandy Fraser, had a lot of hardware experience, and many of us were curious to see what this new chip technology could make possible. After some negotiation, Carver agreed to visit the labs for 6 weeks and teach the class. Sandy pulled some strings and negotiated some aid from the AT&T chip makers. We would design a wafer with multiple different designs, and then the wafer would be sliced apart and each of us would get a few (3-5) chips they designed. Having written the portable C compiler, and also one of the more enthusiastic supporters of this visit, I found myself “nominated” to write the software to support the design. We had just got our first VAX computer, which seemed to be powerful enough to support a dozen or so designers. I had about six weeks to throw together the software to support the chip design class. To our surprise, there were roughly 30 people who signed up for the class. So, what kind of design should we provide. The Mead/Conway “method” involved laying out the chip by hand following certain design rules. There were three kinds of wires: red, green, and black. The red and green wires were special: if a red wire crossed over a green wire, it made a transistor. The black wires carried the power and some of the data signals. In addition to the transistors, there were Vias – these allowed signals to cross between the red, green and black layers. The whole circuit was included in a “box” made up of pads, where the circuit would be connected to the pins of the fabricated chip. There were also design rules. Transistors cannot be to close to other transistors or vias. To make logic circuits we needed to provide voltage and ground using the black wires. The whole circuit was designed on graph paper. It quickly became clear to me that the design language should, as much as possible, hide the design rules so we could concentrate on the geometry. So the design language allowed you to define transistors and vias, and connect the wires to one of the four sides of the transistors or vias or pads. I don’t remember the exact syntax, but the design was a series of statements. Some statements defined names of transistors or vias or pads, without saying how they were connected. Then the heart of the language was doing the interconnections. The active elements had connection points U, D, L or R (for up, down, left, right). If V was a via, we might connect it to a transistor T by writing something like T.RU = V.D Which connected the right port of the transistor T with a wire that goes to the right and then up, and is connected to the down port of the via. Then the program would determine from the design rules how long the wire needed to go to the right and then upwards to hit V. The design language also allowed you to design functional blocks like adders and treat them the same way as the builtin basic elements. The design compiler became an exercise in finding the smallest layout that satisfies all the design rules. There were a variety of quirks that needed to be handled, especially regarding power and ground. When transcribing a design with a few hundred wires it was remarkably easy to confuse left and right or up and down when describing the wire. This led to a cycle that could not be satisfied. To salvage something, hopefully, when there was a cycle, I deleted one of the constraints in the cycle, and tried again. Unfortunately, if the cycle had, say, 6 constraints I had less than a 20% chance of removing the bad one. So a large design with a single flaw could collapse into a murky mudball of elements with occasional wires and transistors sticking out of it. It was most demoralizing. To add to the problems, when our VAX was delivered, apparently at some point something rolled over one of the cables, creating an intermittent fault. So for the first two weeks the VAX would take a very long time to get through all the designs. A frantic week’s work allowed me to package the design rule checker to draw a map of part of the circuit in 24x80 characters. You could zoom in to the site of the design rule error with a few keystrokes. It quickly became the preferred way to design. I remember giving a talk at MIT about the language and the design rule checker that was well received, but I doubt that it was recorded. We produced, I think, 5 multiproject chips, roughly 2 a year. A sixth try was a failure: I had changed the checker to describe the elements by its center rather than the edges, which sped up the checker quite a bit. But when the design went to fab, the guy who usually checked the design for sanity was unavailable and the flaw was missed. Some very interesting chips were produced in the course. Dave Ditzel implemented some ideas in silicon that later showed up in the AT&T Hobbit chip. There were also several network chips. For the third chip, I implemented a real silicon compiler. You could write a logic expression and it would compile it and produce output that could be used in the design. I generated a circuit that could take 16 binary inputs and produce the signals to drive five numerical outputs—a binary to decimal converter. The logic was complicated, but the program laid it out and the chip worked. There were two reasons why the Silicon impulse petered out, in my opinion. One was, we didn’t have a good way to install the chips into any of the computers running Unix. And, if we had managed to do it, the chip would have to have some notion of which process it should respond to — it got complicated… For me personally, I realized that the next step would be to dive into the physics of the system, and I had just accepted a transfer to the AT&T computer company spinoff, managing the language products for System V. This included the portable C compiler, the first commercial C++ compiler, Ada, FORTRAN and Pascal, and a debugger that worked with all of these, so I had my hands full with that. <<<<< Am 10.02.23 um 06:36 schrieb Christian Dreier: