Philip Moorby

Philip Moorby (died September 15, 2022) was a computer engineer, born and raised in Birmingham, United Kingdom, who invented the Verilog hardware description language, which became the industry standard for digital circuit design and simulation. He created the first Verilog simulator, released in early 1985, and developed the faster Verilog-XL logic simulator in 1987, work that let engineers design the complex multibillion-transistor devices used today. Moorby earlier worked on the MU5 computer system at Manchester University and developed the HILO hardware description language from 1976 to 1979, before co-founding Gateway Design Automation in 1983, which Cadence acquired in 1989, naming him its first Corporate Fellow; he later worked at Avid, Co-Design and, from 2002, Synopsys, where he helped guide the evolution of Superlog into SystemVerilog. He earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Southampton University and a master's degree in computer science from Manchester University in 1974, and received the Phil Kaufman Award in 2005.