CAD, Computer Graphics and VLSI

Research in Computer Aided Design started in 1966 when John Oldfield established a Computer Aided Design Project funded by the UK Science Research Council. One of the results from this project was a program called AUTO HALAB. AUTO HALAB was. designed to enable users, "without any knowledge of a programming language, to move lines, curves, and other shapes along particular paths in 3-D and fade them on and off without having to bother about the mathematical details, such as perspective", so it was aimed in particular at teachers of mathematics. John left Edinburgh in 1974 and eventually moved to Syracuse University where he worked on VLSI design.

Many years later Eric McKenzie and Martin Reddy developed a close working relationship with vision psychologists in the Department of Psychology. They had established an Edinburgh Virtual Environment Laboratory (EDVL) that eventually transferred to Computer Science and then transformed into the Edinburgh Virtual Environment Centre (EdVEC), a joint venture between Computer Science and the Edinburgh Regional Computing Centre. EdVEC conducted both research and commercial projects in motion capture and photo-realistic rendering of real scenes for interactive experiences. Reddy’s research for his PhD (Perceptually Modulated Level of Detail for Virtual Environments) led him to SRI International in California and thence to Pixar Animation Studios where he was a CGI software lead on several Academy Award-winning movies.

In the 1980's VLSI design became a major interest in the Department and some of the computer graphics software created in the 1970s to support an undergraduate course in Computer Graphics was developed to create VLSI design tools. In 1981, Sidney Michaelson organised a highly successful conference on VLSI ("VLSI 81: Very Large Scale Integration : Proceedings of the First International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration", ed:John P. Gray, Academic Press, 1981). In 1982 Sidney founded a Working Group on VLSI for the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) that became one of IFIP’s most active groups.

At about the same time John Gray, along with with Irene Buchanan and Peter Robertson, founded Lattice Logic Ltd, a company that pioneered silicon compilation. Later, in 1989, John founded Algotronix, a company that developed a Field Programmable Gate Array. In 1993 Algotronix was taken over by Xilinx, a USA-based company that was itself taken over by another American company, AMD, in 2022.

In the late 1990's several members of the Department contributed to the work of the Institute for System Level Integration (ISLI). ISLI was a collaborative venture between Edinburgh, Glasgow, Heriot Watt and Strathclyde Universities. It was created at the behest of Scottish Enterprise (a Government agency) in response to an inward investment by Cadence Design Systems of San Jose, California, a leading electronic design automation software and design services company. Based in Livingston, ISLI offered a one-year MSc in System Level Integration and an EngD programme. ISLI operated very successfully until a global recession in the semiconductor industry in the early 2000s led to its closure.