Meet General Microelectronics Inc the First Company to Ship a Mos Integrated Circuit

# Meet General Microelectronics Inc: the First Company to Ship a MOS Integrated Circuit

## 1. A Spinoff With a Narrow, Specific Bet

General Microelectronics Inc., founded in Santa Clara by a group of engineers who had worked on early MOS devices at Fairchild, placed a narrow bet: that PMOS, despite being slower than the bipolar logic families dominating the market, could be sold as a complete integrated circuit specifically because it packed far more devices into the same die area. In 1964 the company shipped what is generally credited as the first commercial MOS integrated circuit, a PMOS shift register, to a paying customer rather than a lab.

The part was not fast, and it was not cheap to manufacture at first, but it did something a comparably priced bipolar part could not: it put dozens of transistors worth of shift-register logic on a single small die, because MOS transistors needed none of the isolation diffusions bipolar devices required between adjacent devices on the same chip.

## 2. Why a Shift Register First

A shift register is a repetitive structure: the same small transistor cell, laid out dozens of times in a row. That repetition made it an ideal first product for a company still learning how to control a MOS fabrication line at any kind of yield, because a single process improvement helped every cell on the die at once, and a customer buying a shift register already expected moderate speed in exchange for a compact, low-cost part.