Lynn Conway

Lynn Ann Conway (January 2, 1938 – June 9, 2024) was an American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and transgender rights activist. She worked at IBM in the 1960s and invented generalized dynamic instruction processing, a key technological advance in out-of-order execution and used by the vast majority of modern computer processors to improve performance. Subsequently, she launched the Med-Conway VLSI chip design revolution in the field of very large scale integrated circuits (VLSI). This technological revolution spread rapidly to research universities and the computer industry in the 1980s, spawning the emerging electronic design automation (EDA) industry, spawning the fab infrastructure for modern chip design and production, and launching a series of far-reaching high-tech startups in the 1980s and 1990s.