2025 IEEE History Week

The IEEE Photonics has celebrated the 60th Anniversary of JQE throughout 2025. At the IEEE Photonics Conference in Singapore an author presentation highlighting some of the most influential articles of each decade will take place, with an illustrious panel of speakers and moderated by John Dallessasse, current Editor-in-Chief, and Gregory Stillman Professor in ECE at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The panel will be followed by a meet and greet and networking reception with like-minded professionals. Link: https://ipc2025.exordo.com/programme/session/127

This presentation will discuss the pioneering microprocessor R&D efforts at Bell Labs in 1976-1982 which created a new chip architecture and physical design. New test and verification methods were needed to overcome challenges in CMOS fabrication, and many of this project’s inventions were forerunners of subsequent VLSI developments: high-speed domino circuits to reduce complex logic gate delay times, a twin-tub CMOS process for improved power efficiency and performance, interconnect-centric logic design for signal delay reduction, gate-matrix layout which increased density, 32-bit wide internal and external transfers, and instructions which implemented certain UNIX operating system and C programming language operations