Forty years ago today, January 8, 1980, the first issue of LAMBDA magazine was published. The Mead & Conway revolution was getting underway. Doug Fairbairn was at Xerox PARC with Lynn Conway. He would go on to be one of the founders of VLSI Technology, (and more importantly for me anyway, he hired me and brought me to the US).

For more about Mead & Conway, see my post The Book That Changed Everything. Lynn Conway invented the scalable design rules based around a constant lambda, about half the minimum gate length (so 1um for a 2um process). Doug picked that up as the name of the magazine but...well, you'll have to read the rest of the post to find out why that name didn't last.

Doug realized that every revolution needs its printing press and so he created LAMBDA magazine. You can still see a PDF of the first few pages of the first issue (of course, the picture here is the front cover), going all the way down to 0.5um, what today we would call 500nm...and that was looking forward five years to 1985).

A few years ago, when I started the EDAgraffiti blog, I persuaded Doug to write down for me how it got started, and its impact on the industry. So this is mostly Doug's story in his own words, lightly edited by me. In the rest of this post, "I" doesn't mean me, it means Doug.

Getting into the Magazine Business

Today there would be websites, blogs, twitters, email blasts, etc., but in the late summer of 1979, when it came time to build a community around the rapidly expanding Mead-Conway Design Methodology, we didn’t have those options. Okay, we had email to ARPAnet sites, but that was it. Text only, no graphics, with limited access. So what to do?

Along with several others at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Caltech in Pasadena, we conceived the idea of a magazine focused on this new approach to IC design. We needed to reach a whole new community of designers—engineers who were interested in taking a systems approach to IC design…mapping architectures to silicon…silicon compilers….new types of design automation. There were lots of new ideas, articles to write, and excitement to share. Working through the mainstream publications was just not going to work.

It probably seems shocking to most that we could formulate an idea and make plans to publish a magazine on a new design methodology from the confines of an industrial research lab. But for those of us at Xerox PARC, it was just a natural extension of what we were already doing. The lab had been in operation for eight or so years by then and its research focus was almost entirely internally directed. Whatever we thought was a good idea was what got done. That philosophy, combined with some of the world’s best computer scientists, engineers, physicists, and other researchers had already created the first personal workstation, Ethernet, laser printers, the optical mouse, and many other building blocks of the personal computer revolution to come.

In fact, it was this strong expertise in document creation and publishing that made the idea of a magazine seem downright reasonable. We found a Xerox group in Pasadena, CA who had interfaced an optical typesetting machine to PARC’s Alto personal computer. They saw the new magazine as a way to work out the kinks and prove the value of computer-based typesetting. They agreed to help with the logistics and, most importantly, pay for the layout and printing of the first four issues of LAMBDA.

I did clear the project with our lab director, Bert Sutherland, and figured with his approval I didn’t need to seek any further permission. Even at PARC, I knew if you asked enough people, there were certainly some who would find it outside our mission! As I remember, he had only one serious question: “What would I do after the first four quarterly issues?”. My response was practical, “If it is a roaring success, I’ll know what to do. If it’s a dismal failure, I’ll know what to do. If it’s somewhere in between, I’ll have to decide.” With that we were off and running.

In the Magazine Business

The next step was content…starting with the cover. Given the title of LAMBDA (the scaling unit in the Mead/Conway design methodology), it was an easy choice to use the Chuck Seitz analogy comparing the network of interconnect with the grid of roads which made up a typical city. The cover showed four different scales for lambda from lambda=12μ to Lambda=0.12μ. At the time LAMBDA was first published lambda values were approximately 2.5μ, implying minimum lines and spaces of 5μ [5000nm].

The magazine opened with a letter “from the editors”. We boldly forecasted that “In the near future, we will see a radical upgrading of design aids”, a need “to develop new design methodologies… “, and “to turn our attention to higher level optimizations”. These seem obvious now, but at the time the universal focus on hand-optimizing silicon area at all costs was still strongly in place, and would remain so for nearly a decade. We closed the editorial comments with the following paragraph:

When design activity is localized within small groups in a few companies, formal communications mechanisms such as magazines are not appropriate. Now that integrated circuit design has broken those bounds and is actively practiced by a large number of people in diverse companies and universities, we feel that a magazine devoted strictly to their needs is required. LAMBDA is that magazine.

The remainder of this first 32-page issue contained various news items, an update on university activities, and four feature articles on IC Fabrication for the Independent Chip Designer by Robert Hon, Ideas About Arbiters by Prof. Charles Seitz of Caltech, The Design of a 16 x 16 Multiplier” by Rodney Masumoto of TRW, and VTI Bets on Custom by yours truly.

This last article is of particular note, as it outlined the business plan of a company, VLSI Technology Inc, that planned to offer foundry services to the new design community at which LAMBDA was targeted. As fate would have it, I became the fourth founder of this new company, quitting Xerox to join the new firm on about the same day (January 8, 1980) that the first issue of LAMBDA hit the streets.

Amazingly, Xerox agreed to underwrite the second issue of LAMBDA, even though I had left the company. But that was the end of their largesse and I was on my own. Even though I was part of a new startup, VLSI Technology was still in fund-raising mode and I had lots of time on my hands. I set about learning what it meant to be a magazine publisher, a business I had no clue about at the time.

I was sitting in my home office, keeping myself busy while my magazine business was on hold when the phone rang. Some guy from Harris Semiconductor in Florida wanted to place an ad in the next issue! Uh… call you back! Now what? I don’t know if there will be a next issue! But wait, maybe this is it! A quick calculation shows I need $15,000 to pay the printing bill. If I sell 15 pages of ads for $1,000 each, I’ve got it covered. I called him back and sold him the back cover of the fourth quarter issue (there never was a third quarter issue that year) and went to the work on the phones. I called all my friends and non-friends who I knew in the industry, and after six weeks of working the phones, I had it! Exactly 15 pages of ads! And what an issue! 80 pages of ads and quality editorial. Advertisers included Calma, Applicon, Sperry-Univac, Harris (of course), and many others. Jim Clark, Ron Rivest, Randy Bryant, Ed Cheng, and others who in the subsequent years would make major contributions to the field, authored eight featured articles. We were off!

There was one more magazine industry lesson I learned in 1981—don’t be too clever when it comes to a name. In early 1981, I received a letter from power-supply company Lambda Electronics saying that I was infringing their copyright and that I should cease using their name for the magazine. I had already discovered that although LAMBDA might seem like a clever name, it’s meaning was far from obvious to those who weren’t already “in the know”. People commented that they saw the magazine and assumed it was a power supply catalog. As I looked around, I discovered that magazines were normally pretty upfront with their names: Newsweek, Playboy, House and Garden, Electronics, Electronic Times….you get the idea. So we took the opportunity to get off Lambda’s “sue ‘em” list and changed the name to “VLSI Design”.

Getting out of the Magazine Business

In January 1983, I woke up one morning and said to myself, “I can’t do this anymore!” Two startups are killing me! Again, fate played its hand. Within a week or two of this self-realization, I had two parties interested in buying the publication. By then it was a well-known and well-respected industry magazine with a circulation in the 30,000 range. In February 1983, VLSI Technology went public. In May 1983, I sold the magazine to CMP Publications, the most respected electronics industry publisher of the day. We’ll put that down as a good year!

Sunday Brunch

Me (Paul) again. I would love it if Breakfast Bytes had "a circulation in the 30,000 range". There are about 6,000 people who get the Sunday Brunch email when they get to work on Monday morning. It lists the five posts from Breakfast Bytes from the week before, and you can click on the titles of any that interest you to read the whole post. You can join them. Just click on