CMOS And EDA? They'll Never Happen, said Ferranti Bosses

"I remember a couple of stories you wrote in EW about Ferranti", said Cliffe, "the first one was quoting Brian Down (former marketing director at Ferranti Semiconductors) saying that CMOS would never become significant in the semiconductor industry."

Ferranti, of course was wedded to its bipolar CDI (Collector Diffused Isolation) process which it had licensed from Bell Labs.

"The second story in EW", continued Cliffe, "quoted David Grundy (former technical director of Ferranti Semiconductors) saying that automated circuit design would never become necessary in the industry."

And what did for Ferranti which once had a better than 50 per cent market share in the world semi-custom IC market?

LSI Logic and others took over the semi-custom market by bringing in CMOS process technology and massive mainframe-based computing power to drive automated electronic IC design.

TOMORROW MORNING: TOP TEN WISH-LIST FOR  SEMICONDUCTOR INDUSTRY