Semiconductor History

  Fujitsu, formed in 1935, became a pre-eminent Japanese electronics technology business. Telecom equipment, systems and consumer devices; personal computers to mainframes; like other global corporations at the time they invested heavily in vertical integration technologies. They were the first company in the world to develop 64Kbit DRAM memories in 1978, and invested heavily to develop and manufacture higher density memories. The DRAM chip shown here is an NMOS 256Kbit DRAM from 1985. This was the year that Intel and other American companies pulled out of the DRAM market due to price pressure from Japanese companies. Fujitsu introduced their 1Mbit DRAM later that same year. The DRAM was first developed at IBM, then adopted by other US companies. By 1985 only a couple of US suppliers remained. IBM still continued to manufacture as an internal supplier to their systems businesses.   

Contemporary Calculator with 100 MSI ICs and 82 Transistors It is widely accepted that a small company in California called Intel developed the world's first microprocessor in 1971. In the late 60s and early 70s there was significant interest from calculator companies to further reduce the size and cost of desktop calculators, and to create a new market for personal calculators. Calculators had for some time used discrete transistors, and latterly discrete logic and custom MSI ICs, but a single chip calculator was only a vision. However, there was another microprocessor development happening in Glenrothes Scotland, also designed for the burgeoning calculator market which may have beat Intel to the market, both in timing and performance. The Formation of Pico Electronics Ltd Elliott Automation was a significant British computer maker who in the 1960s realised the need to progress its own semiconductor technology. In 1966 the company established a facility in Glenrothes to manufactu...