Keynote Talk: A History of the VLSI Design Conference

In December 1985, a group of about eighty-five assembled on the campus of the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai for the First International Workshop on VLSI Design. The sole purpose of that meeting was to sense the level of VLSI activities in India. We were looking for a focus for engineering education and research. We felt that VLSI technology will be an area of progress in the coming years. The workshop was concluded with great enthusiasm but with no plan for the future. Therefore, it was no surprise that no workshop was held in the following year or the year after. The Second and Third Workshops were held, with some difficulties, in 1988 and 1990, respectively. Fortunately, those initial workshops created enough synergy to get the ball rolling. They spun off their own sponsoring society, the VLSI Society of India. Today, the International Conference on VLSI Design has come a long way to become a conference with world-wide recognition. This talk traces the history of the conference, its beginning, the struggling years, successes, failures and some groundbreaking contributions that made it what it is today.