This was kicked off by Lynn Conway's famous VLSI design course at MIT [1], which began the Mead & Conway revolution.
You can find a more detailed write-up of that course and other courses it inspired (as well as some of the practical challenges involved) in her retrospective in IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine [2].
An excerpt:
> "Importantly, these weren’t just
any designs, for many pushed the
envelope of system architecture.
Jim Clark, for instance, prototyped
the Geometry Engine and went on to
launch Silicon Graphics Incorporated
based on that work (see Fig. 16).
Guy Steele, Gerry Sussman, Jack
Holloway and Alan Bell created the
follow-on ‘Scheme’ (a dialect of LISP)
microprocessor, another stunning
design."
Wow that second link ("Reminiscences of the VLSI Revolution") turned out to be a 29 page rabbit hole providing a fantastic glimpse into the history and early days of chip design and engineering, thanks a lot for posting that! Here's a direct link to the PDF: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.69...
You can find a more detailed write-up of that course and other courses it inspired (as well as some of the practical challenges involved) in her retrospective in IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine [2].
An excerpt:
> "Importantly, these weren’t just any designs, for many pushed the envelope of system architecture. Jim Clark, for instance, prototyped the Geometry Engine and went on to launch Silicon Graphics Incorporated based on that work (see Fig. 16). Guy Steele, Gerry Sussman, Jack Holloway and Alan Bell created the follow-on ‘Scheme’ (a dialect of LISP) microprocessor, another stunning design."
[1] https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/MIT78.htm...
[2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6393023