Prof. Dr. Thorsten Jungmann (last updated 2026-10-03)
Phil Moorby (1953–2022) was a British engineer and computer scientist. He was born and brought up in Birmingham, England, studied mathematics at Southampton University and received his master’s degree in computer science from Manchester University in 1974. In 1983 he moved to the United States. At Gateway Design Automation he developed Verilog-XL, the first and industry standard simulator for the hardware description language Verilog. Gateway was acquired by Cadence Design Systems in 1989. Moorby later worked for SynaPix (from 1997), for Co-Design Automation (from 1999) and for Synopsys (from 2002), where he worked on the SystemVerilog verification language. In 2005 he received the Phil Kaufman Award for his contributions to the electronic design automation (EDA) industry, specifically for the development and popularization of Verilog, and in 2016 he was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum.
Verilog is a hardware description language (HDL) used to model electronic systems. It was created between late 1983 and early 1984 by Prabhu Goel, Phil Moorby and Chi-Lai Huang. It is most commonly used in the design and verification of digital circuits at the register-transfer level. Unlike software programming languages, a hardware description language models physical hardware, including concurrent operation, signal timing and electrical behaviour.
Verilog modules written in a synthesizable coding style can be turned by synthesis software into a netlist, which ultimately leads to a circuit fabrication blueprint, such as a photo mask set for an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) or a bitstream file for a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Verilog was standardized as IEEE Standard 1364-1995; since 2009 it has been part of the SystemVerilog standard (IEEE 1800-2009). Its main competitor is the hardware description language VHDL.
Reference and further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Moorby
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verilog
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array