Bill Bowhill

The relentless pace of Moore’s law has enabled rapid evolution of microprocessors performance with resulting dramatic increases in complexity. This talk will review some microprocessor design history and reflect on the speaker’s 40+ years of work in the semiconductor industry. Circuit innovation has been an important contributor delivering performance. However, the overriding requirement has been to deliver ever more complex high-quality designs on schedule to intercept the latest technology node. The goal of this talk will be to provide practical insights of value today and the future for engineers entering the field. 

Biography:

Bill Bowhill recently retired as a Senior Principal Design Engineer working at Intel’s Massachusetts Microprocessor Design Center. In a career of over 40+ years he has worked on many different technical areas of microprocessor design: including memories, floating point, integer execution, power systems and clocking systems. He has been involved with all phases of development from product definition, system and process optimization, physical design, chip tape-in, silicon debug, and high-volume manufacturing product introduction. He has been a technical leader on many generations of microprocessor design including: X86, Itanium, VAX, and Alpha Microprocessors.

Bill Bowhill received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in electronic engineering from Liverpool University, U.K in 1981. He began his industry career working for Standard Telecommunication Research Laboratories, Harlow UK before joining Digital Equipment Corporation USA in 1985. He has co-authored many papers on microprocessor design and circuits for conferences and journals. He co-edited the book Design of High-Performance Microprocessor Circuits (Wiley-IEEE) and has participated in the organization of many conferences. 

He is currently the 2024-2025 President of the IEEE Solid State Circuit Society.