Over the course of 7 years, the Microsystems Research Center of MIT undertook a series of advanced research inquiries in early Very Large Scale Integrated-circuit (VLSI) technology. Publicized as 428 unique papers documenting their research in three distinct phases, fifteen MIT faculty worked tirelessly to achieve this relatively obscure body of work which culminated in the design and fabrication of two unique chips. A detailed summary can be found by reading the final report "A Coherent VLSI Design Environment".

Currently only a small number of these papers have been excavated from the MIT Archives with the studious help of the staff there. There presently remains the challenge of correctly converting RCA titles into their correct form.

The initial proposal made by Professor Paul Penfield was made on January 4th, 1980 and is the first memo "Integrated Circuit Series" 80-1.

Here, Penfield states that the goal of the series was to “disseminate recent results and ideas in various stages of development to others at M.I.T. who may be interested.” The remainder of the memo is dedicated to describing how memos will be handled and published (if at all), along with general guidelines for writing.

Several memos were published this day and within the following few months.

80-1 "Integrated Circuit Series," Paul Penfield, Jr., January 1980. (4 pp.)
80-2 "Using APL on the Speech System 20," Paul Penfield, Jr., January 1980. (7 pp.)
80-3 "Design Considerations for a Partial Differential Equation Machine," Arvind and Randal E. Bryant, January 1980. (10 pp.)
80-4 "Information Transfer and Area-Time Tradeoffs for VLSI Multiplication," Harold Abelson and Peter Andreae, January 1980. (9 pp.)
80-5 "A Monolithic Moisture Sensor," Kou Togashi and Stephen D. Senturia, January 1980. (9 pp.)
80-6 "The SCHEME-79 Chip," Jack Holloway, Guy L. Steele, Gerald J. Sussman, and Alan Bell, January 1980. (43 pp.)
80-7 "MOSSIM: A Logic-Level Simulator for MOS LSI. User's Manual Version 2," Randal E. Bryant, February 1980. (19 pp.)
80-8 "The Implementation of Regular Logic with Feedback Reduced PLAs," Lance A. Glasser, February 1980. (5pp.)
80-9 "Reflections on AIDS-79," Paul Penfield, Jr., March 1980. (4 pp.)

In the final report this first phase of research is listed as beginning on the 12 May, 1980 and ending 2 years to the day on the 11th of May, 1982.

80-10 "Student Guide to VLSI Research at M.I.T.," Paul Penfield, Jr., Revised yearly. (15 pp.)
80-11 "Introduction to the Design Rule Checker," Larry Seiler, March 1980. (3 pp.)
80-12 "Geometrical Primitive Objects for Integrated Circuit Specification," Larry Seiler, March 1980. (6 pp.)
80-13 "The Cost of Designing for Testability in Terms of Integrated Circuit Yield," Lance A. Glasser, March 1980. (9 pp.)
80-14 "AIDS-79 User's Manual," Paul Penfield, Jr., March 1980. (37 pp.)
80-15 "The Nature of VLSI Circuit Design," Lance A. Glasser, May 1980. (5 pp.)
80-16 "Artwork Analysis Tools for VLSI Circuits," Clark M. Baker, June 1980. (75 pp.)
80-17 "An Integrated Circuit Two-Phase Programmable Clock Generator," Fasal Abbas, June 1980. (81 pp.)
80-18 "A Microprocessor-Compatible Charge-Flow Transistor Oscillator," Harvey W. Jong, June 1980. (55 pp.)
80-19 "The Design of Integrated Distributed Amplifiers," Jeffrey C. McHarg, June 1980. (95 pp.)
80-20 "Documentation of the RSA Chip Assembler," Ronald L Rivest, July 1980. (27 pp.)
80-21 "MOSSIM: A Logic-Level Simulator for MOS LSI - User's Manual," Randal E. Bryant, July 1980. (19 pp.)
80-22 "A VLSI Implementation of a Two-by-Two Packet Router," Paul S. Ries, July 1980. (98 pp.)
80-23 "A Test Generation Technique for Devices Without Gate-Level Descriptions," Robert A. Todd, July 1960. (50 pp.)
80-24 "An Algorithm for MOS Logic Simulation," Randal E. Bryant, July 1980. (16 pp.)
80-25 "An Interactive PLA Generator as an Archetype for a New VLSI Design Methodology," Lance A. Glasser and Paul Penfield, Jr., July 1980. (16 pp.)
80-26 "A Processing Element for a Large Multiple Processor Dataflow Machine," Arvind, Vinod Kathail, and Keshav Pingali August 1980. (5 pp.)
80-27 "A Polynomial Time Algorithm for Optimal Routing Around a Rectangle," Andrea S. LaPaugh, August 1980. (28 pp.)
80-28 "Conversion of Algorithms to Custom Integrated Circuits: An M.I.T. Perspective," Jonathan Allen, August 1980. (3 pp.)
80-29 "Report on the NBS/JPL/USC-ISI Test Chip Workshop, Pasadena, California, August 20, 1980," Mark G. Johnson, September 1980. (28 pp.)
80-30 "Tool for Verifying Integrated Circuit Designs," Clark Baker and Chris Terman, September 1980. (28 pp.)
80-31 "The Design Procedure Language Manual," John Batali and Anne Hartheimer, September 1980. (81 pp.)
80-32 "The Definition and Implementation of a Computer Progamming Language Based on Constraints," Guy L. Steele, Jr., December 1980. (371 pp.)
80-33 "VLSI Design Automation Activities at M.I.T.," J. Alle and P. Penfield, Jr., Rev. July 1981. (30 pp.)
80-34 "Addendum to AIDS-79 User's Manual," Paul Penfleld, Jr., October 1980. (9 pp.)
80-35 "LSIAA: LSI Artwork Analysis System," Gary E. Kopec, November 1980. (16 pp.)
80-36 "The Analog Behavior of Digital Integrated Circuits," Lance A. Glasser, December 1980. (10 pp.)
80-37 "Architectures for Analog LSI Implementations of Speech Processing Systems," Patrick W. Bosshart, December 1980. (186 pp.)
80-38 "Algorithms for Integrated Circuit Layout: An Analytic Approach," Andrea S. LaPaugh, December 1980. (179 pp.)
80-39 "The Apiary Network Architecture for Knowledgeable Systems," Carl Hewett, December 1980. (11 pp.)

81-40 "Signal Delay in RC Tree Networks," Jorge Rubinstein, Paul Penfield, Jr. and Mark A. Horowitz, January 1981. (7 pp.)
81-41 "Special Purpose Hardware for Design Rule Checking." Larry Seiler, February 1981. (20 pp.)
81-42 "Electron Beam Testing and Restructuring of Integrated Circuits," D. C. Shaver, February 1981. (17 pp.)
81-43 "A One Transistor RAM for MPC Projects," James J. Cherry and Gerald L. Roylance, February 1981. (13 pp.)
81-44 "A Multiproject Chip Approach to the Teaching of Analog MOS LSI and VLSI," Yannis P. Tsividis and Dimitri A. Antoniadis, February 1981. (17 pp.)
81-45 "The Scaling of Clock Noise in MOS Integrated Circuits," Lance A. Glasser, March 1981. (4 pp.)
81-46 "New Layouts for the Shuffle-Exchange Graph," Daniel Kleitman, Frank Thomson Leighton, Margaret Lepely and Gary L. Miller, March 1981 (15 pp.)
81-47 "MOSSIM: A Switch-Level Simulator for MOS LSI," Randal Bryant, April 1981. (15 pp.)
81-48 "Signal Delay in MOS Interconnections," Paul Penfield, Jr. and Jorge Rubinstein, April 1981. (15 pp.)
81-49 "MOSFETs on Silicon Prepared by Moving Melt Zone Recrystallization of Encapsulated Polycrystaline Silicon on an Insulating Substrate," E. Maby, M. Geis, Y. LeCoz, D. Silversmith, R. Mountain, and D. A. Antoniadis, May 1981. (13 pp.)
81-50 "A Switch-Level Simulation Model for Integrated Logic Circuits," Randal E. Bryant, June 1981. (219 pp)
81-51 "A Hardware Compiler for Boolean Logic Functions," Douglas D. Williams, June 1981. (53 pp.)
81-52 "A Switch-Level Model of MOS Logic Circuits," Randal E. Bryant, June 1981. (10 pp.)
81-53 "MSHOW: Multi-Media Layout Display Program," Gary E. Kopec, July 1981. (13 pp.)
81-54 "The Impact of VLSI on Signal Processing Algorithms and Architectures," Gary E. Kopec, July 1981. (7 pp.)
81-55 "Principal Values and Branch Cuts in Complex APL," Paul Penfield, Jr., July 1981. (9 pp.)
81-56 "Chopper Stabilization of MOS Operation Amplifiers Using Feed-Forward Techniques," Michael C. W. Coln, July 1981. (16 pp.)
81-57 "AIDS, APL Integrated-Circuit Design System," Paul Penfield, Jr., July 1981. (8 pp.)
81-58 "Optimal Layouts for Small Shuffle-Exchange Graphs," Frank T. Leighton and Gary L. Miller, August 1981. (10 pp.)
81-59 "A Low Temperature Process to Increase the Grain Size in Polysilicon Films," Rafael Reif and Jonathan E. Knott, August 1981. (12 pp.)
81-60 "A Low Temperature Process to Produce Large-Grain Uniformly-Oriented Polycrystalline Silicon Films on Amorphous Substrates," Jonathan E. Knott, August 1981 (50 pp.)
81-61 "HISDL - A Structure Description Language," Willie Y-P. Lim, September 1981. (16 pp.)
81-62 "The Syntactic Analysis of VLSI Systems Using Graphs," Lance A. Glasser, September 1981. (5 pp.)
81-63 "Clocking Semi-Groups for VLSI Circuit Analysis," Lance A. Glasser, September 1981. (4 pp.)
81-64 "Vertical Single-Gate CMOS Inverters on Laser-Processed Multilayer Substrates," G. T. Goeloe, E. Maby, D. J. Silversmith, R. W. Mountain, and D. A. Antoniadis, September 1981. (3 pp.)
81-65 "An Introduction to DPL," John Batali, October 1981. (24 pp.)
81-66 "Optimal Placement for River Routing," Charles E. Leiserson and Ron Y. Pinter, October 1981. (16 pp.)
81-67 "Oxidation Induced Point Defects in Silicon," Dimitri A. Antoniadis, October 1981. (24 pp.)
81-68 "Use of Process and 2-D MOS Simulation in the Study of Doping Profile Influence on S/D Resistance in Short Channel MOSFET's," P. Antognetti, C. Lombardi, and D. Antoniadis, October 1981. (4 pp.)
81-69 "Transmission Diffraction Gratings for Soft X-Ray Spectroscopy and Spatial Period Division," Andrew Michael Hawryluk, October 1981. (182 pp.)
81-70 "Dynamics of Oxygen Incorporation During Czochralski Silicon Growth," David Francis Bliss, November 1981. (69 pp.)