Seeking data on California Devices Inc HCS gate arrays

Weren't there some sorts of scandals around Cal Dev? Fraud, crime, something.

Yep. Stock manipulation. Fortunately I was paid before the shit hit the fan. (My first LiIon battery charge controller design.)

AMI was purchased a while back by ON Semi. ON Semi apparently still maintains the long channel device processing line in Pocatello.

I just had occasion to need such a process and surprise!surprise!, My AMI support account is still active after 9 years of non-use :-) ...Jim Thompson

I used some weird 1 Kbit AMI DRAMs once, in my first color video generator, but that may have been a different AMI. Each bit was two cross-coupled nfets, and two more fets to gate their drains out to pins. The rest was up to the user.

Didn't the CEO go to jail?

I seem to recall their making some sort of cool dmos fet parts, with separate substrate pins, sort of like the Siliconix things. And they made some sort on MOS capacitors.

IIRC, Yes.

I was only involved on that one chip. Their engineering manager left and formed EPIC Semiconductor, but that flopped, too. ...Jim Thompson

Looks like someone has resurrected the EPIC name... in Vancouver.

...Jim Thompson

What blather. Bet they fail, too.

I'll check out under ON Semiconductor as well, thanks ...

I was not aware of the murky business side of things. Just after the tech facts for a rather old chip technology :)

I'm hoping someone, somewhere has an old book with this sort of out of date info!

Maybe they just like the name >:-} I note that the original Epic Semiconductor, Inc., 4703 S. Lakeshore Dr., Tempe, AZ still shows up, but last updated in 2009 ;-)

Who knows what the public will buy into... look how people rave about solar power. ...Jim Thompson

Nobody "raves" about solar power. The point is that it can be made to work, and it gets you electricity without increasing the amount of CO2 in the at mosphere - currently at 400ppm, 50% higher than it was at the start of the industrial revolution (about 270ppm), and had been since the end of the las t ice age.

During the ice age (and previous ice ages) it got down to 180ppm, which is part of the reason why the ice ages were cold.

The down side of solar power is that it now costs about twice as much as po wer generated from burning fossil carbon. If we had the sense to charge the fossil carbon burners for the damage they are doing to climate - mainly in terms of more extreme weather events at the moment, though if we manage to warm up the planet by another degree Kelvin we'll probably srtart running into other expensive complications - solar power would power would look les s relatively expensive, but that requires the kind of foresight that recogn ises that burning fossil carbon is creating expensive problems, and will cr eate more expensive problems later on.

Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson isn't big on foresight.

I did probably some of the same Google searches that you did. There were some hits that were probably ads for these chips in old trade magazines, but Google didn't have full-page views for them.

The HC Series design manual is available! (In Shanghai.)

There were a couple of hits for the DLM series (apparently a later development - 2.5 micron) at one of the datasheet sites, but nothing for HC or HCS. DLM:

Chapter 26 of this book gives a brief history of California Devices, written by the founder, Bob Lipp. No datasheets, though. "Silicon Destiny: The Story of Application Specific Integrated Circuits and LSI Logic Corporation", by Rob Walker and Nancy Tersini. Walker Research Associates, 1992.

I found a resume' of a guy who worked there back in the day... maybe he has an old data book in the garage. :)

Matt Roberds

Hmm, I wonder if I can it shipped to my local library :)

Downloaded ... a little more complex than I was expecting but not that much further on. 3 x transistor pairs per cell, not 2 x transistor pairs as per the Ferranti ones of similar/earlier vintage.

Now that would be funny. If I don't find something on the 'net, I may well drop a note in his direction ...

Thanks for looking, you had better luck than me.

The IC Master book set from Heast Business Publications had a Custom/Semicustom section in books from that era.

The editions I have bracket that date. The 1982 set has a one page of ad for CDI, the 1986 set has 10? pages of product summaries for DLM and CHA series of parts. Maybe in between?

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

Good thought, I will have a look and see what I can find on there.

Mike.

Ah, nuts. 1989 edition has no reference to CDI (they have California Micro, but I don't recognise anything useful). CDI are listed in the abbreviations list, under "CalDevices" -- but don't appear elsewhere in the book.

Still looking ...