Microchip Pioneer Lynn Conway, Who Overcame Transgender Discrimination, Dies At 86

IBM fired the technology legend in 1968 after she disclosed she was undergoing a gender transition, but formally apologized in 2020, and gave her a lifetime achievement award.

Lynn Conway, a pioneer in the design of microchips that are at the heart of consumer electronics who overcame discrimination as a transgender person, has died at age 86.

Her June 9 death was announced by the University of Michigan, where Conway was on the engineering faculty until she retired in 1998.

“She overcame so much, but she didn’t spend her life being angry about the past,” said Valeria Bertacco, computer science professor and U-M vice provost. “She was always focused on the next innovation.”

Conway is credited with developing a simpler method for designing microchips in the 1970s, along with Carver Mead of the California Institute of Technology, the university said.

“Chips used to be designed by drawing them with paper and pencil like an architect’s blueprints in the pre-digital era,” Bertacco said. “Conway’s work developed algorithms that enabled our field to use software to arrange millions, and later billions, of transistors on a chip.”