I was also looking for some detail / insight on the work itself, and what the finished product was like. The linked brochure cleared it up a little, but not that much:
Well I guess the logical implication is that EVERY chip was hand-made, like the BMOW? I’m sure there was some automation (lithography?) and some hand-made parts, but I didn’t get a sense of that from the article
Also even today there are manufacturing technicians, etc. So I wonder how long this type of job existed
I am not a chip designer, but my understanding is that manual layout of the wiring on a chip ended at the VLSI era (early ‘80s.) With Very Large Scale Integration, software evolved to let the designers work at a higher level of abstraction, larger circuit blocks, and the software would figure out where to run the individual wires.
This is a super fascinating article, though the prose is a bit dense
Without much knowledge in this area, it reminded me that my first boss designed and physically built an 8-bit CPU from simple logic chips:
https://www.bigmessowires.com/bmow1/
(and also built a CPU that can run Linux - https://www.bigmessowires.com/68-katy/ )
I was also looking for some detail / insight on the work itself, and what the finished product was like. The linked brochure cleared it up a little, but not that much:
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2017/01/102770254-05-01-acc.pdf
Well I guess the logical implication is that EVERY chip was hand-made, like the BMOW? I’m sure there was some automation (lithography?) and some hand-made parts, but I didn’t get a sense of that from the article
Also even today there are manufacturing technicians, etc. So I wonder how long this type of job existed
I am not a chip designer, but my understanding is that manual layout of the wiring on a chip ended at the VLSI era (early ‘80s.) With Very Large Scale Integration, software evolved to let the designers work at a higher level of abstraction, larger circuit blocks, and the software would figure out where to run the individual wires.