Once Upon A Time... ASIC designers developed IC for Supercomputer in the 80's

By SemiWiki

July 8, 2011

During last week-end, I had the good surprise to meet with one of my oldest friend, Eric, and his wife and 3 kids. Then we remind the old good time (when we could have a long night but short sleep time, then go to work) where we were working together as ASIC designers for… a Supercomputer project. In France, in a French company (Thomson CSF) active in the military segment and being able to spend which was at that time a fortune ($25M) to develop a supercomputer from scratch, and when I say from scratch, that mean that we had to invent almost everything, except the ASIC design methodology and the EDA tools, both being provided by VLSI Technology Inc. To be honest, we have been very lucky that a French solution (like Matra Harris Semiconductor or Thomson Composant Speciaux) had not be chosen, which could have happened for obscure political reasons. We had in our hands which were considered as the Rolls Royce for ASIC designers in 1987: all the design team was equipped with SUN workstation, and the design tool set from VLSI was really user friendly… except it was missing a synthesis tool, but none of us knew Synopsys, this obscure start-up, so we were pretty happy to start. Just for your information, I will describe what was the type of work done by a two engineer team during a 18 month period.

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