This was kicked off by Lynn Conway's famous VLSI design course at MIT [1], which began the Mead & Conway revolution.
You can find a more detailed write-up of that course and other courses it inspired (as well as some of the practical challenges involved) in her retrospective in IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine [2].
An excerpt:
> "Importantly, these weren’t just any designs, for many pushed the envelope of system architecture. Jim Clark, for instance, prototyped the Geometry Engine and went on to launch Silicon Graphics Incorporated based on that work (see Fig. 16). Guy Steele, Gerry Sussman, Jack Holloway and Alan Bell created the follow-on ‘Scheme’ (a dialect of LISP) microprocessor, another stunning design."
[1] https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/MIT78.htm...