Born Kansas City, Missouri.
Worked with Curt Widdoes on the construction of SCALD at Stanford. co-founded Valid Logic Systems in 1981. His Ph.D. thesis was the SCALD Timing Verifier.
In 1987, McWilliams co-founded Key Computer Laboratories, which developed one of the early superscalar pipelined computers. Key was acquired by Amdahl Corporation in 1989, where McWilliams served as a VP in the Systems Architecture Group until 1992.
From 1996 to 2001, McWilliams was Distinguished Engineer and Principal Investigator at Sun Microsystems, working on server architecture and advanced CAD tools. From 1993 to 1996, he managed microprocessor development in the MIPS architecture group at Silicon Graphics.
In 2001 co-founded PathScale, which developed a low-latency, high-bandwidth InfiniBand system interconnect. PathScale was acquired by QLogic in 2006.
Chairman, CTO and co-founder of Schooner Information Technology, which provided MySQL and Memcached appliances. Acquired by SanDisk 2012
Bay Storage Technology
Ph.D., Computer Science, Stanford University
MSEE, Electrical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University
McWilliams won the 1984 IEEE “W. Wallace McDowell Award” for the creation of the SCALD design methodology.
