The Microsystems Design Lab was founded in 1977 at The Pennsylvania State University by Prof. Mary Jane Irwin, who remains as a director of the Lab. The current co-directors of the center include Vijaykrishnan Narayanan, Mahmut Kandemir, Jack Sampson, Sumeet Gupta, Mehdi Kiani and Swaroop Ghosh. Former co-directors of the lab include Prof. Robert E. Owens (deceased), and Prof. Yuan Xie. The Lab has more than 40 current graduate students and more than 200 alumni.

The lab has produced unique artifacts such as the MGAP2, Arithmetic Cube, SPARTAN, TANOR, NeoVision 2 special purpose computers; widely used design automation tools such as Simplepower, NVSim and 3D-Cacti; and groundbreaking technologies such as Dual-Vdd FPGAs and leakage power management.

The lab has many exciting projects in the areas of intelligent computer architectures, ultra-low power computing, hardware security, data center computing, software systems for memory and storage and emerging devices, circuits and systems.