Phil Moorby

Phil Moorby (1953 to 2022) was a British engineer and computer scientist who invented the Verilog hardware description language. Born and raised in Birmingham, England, he studied mathematics at Southampton University and took a master's degree in computer science at Manchester University in 1974, moving to the United States in 1983. While at Gateway Design Automation in 1984 he created Verilog together with Verilog-XL, the first and industry standard simulator for it; Cadence Design Systems bought Gateway in 1990. Later he worked at SynaPix on match moving and video tracking, at Co-Design Automation from 1999, and from 2002 at Synopsys on the SystemVerilog verification language. He received the 2005 Phil Kaufman Award for his contribution to electronic design automation and was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2016. He died in Rockport, Massachusetts, in 2022.