General Micro-electronics(GM-e), founded in 1963 by ex-Fairchild employees to design and manufacture Metal Oxide Semiconductor(MOS) Integrated Circuits, shows the world's first complex MOS Integrated Circuit intended for the commercial market at the WESCON trade show in Los Angeles, California in late August of 1964.

The device was called the pL-20, with pL standing for PicoLogic, which was GM-e's trade name for its early MOS integrated circuits that it continued to use in its larger-scale devices.

This short news-byte concerning GM-e's showing of the device was hardly fitting in terms of the significance of the showing of this device. It marked the beginning of the commercial application of MOS integrated circuit technology at levels of integration that were unheard of prior to this time.

The pL20 was a 20-bit shift register. At the time, there was no higher-density commercial data storage means available, with the 20 bits of storage contained on a square 0.041 (41 mils) inches per side. With that density, in theory, 12,180 bits would fit in a square inch, though in practice with packaging and interconnect, it'd likely be something around 1/3rd that amount in a square inch though at the time, such a device would be impossible to build. Even so, the new device marked a huge advance in electronic storage density, and. GM-e would quite quickly take advantage of its pioneering lead in MOS IC technology by adding more complex devices to its Pico-Logic product line.

This device, when it became generally available in early 1965 as the pL5000, was the first of a series of devices with ever-increasing complexity developed by GM-e that revolutionized the integrated circuit industry, shifting the focus from bipolar integrated circuit technology, which had limited scalability due to its requirement for a more complex transistor structure, to MOS devices, with transistor structures that were significantly less complex, used less power, were significantly smaller, and much easier to construct, thus allowing more transistors to be packed onto a chip.

It was an extremely important advance, because at that time, there was no such thing as integrated circuit RAM (Random Access Memory). Integrated circuit RAM wouldn't come until a few more years, and would first be bipolar before going to MOS. All other forms of computer memory commonly in use at the time (such as magnetic core, thin-film magnetic memory, rotating magnetic memory, magnetic tape, and ultrasonic and magnetostrictive delay lines) were large, heavy, difficult to manage, required complex circuitry, and used a lot of energy.

GM-e's introduction of this technology (which was already in use by certain government sectors for some time before the public announcement) would allow a high volume of data to be stored a small space, using much less power than previously-used storage systems. Smaller, lighter, faster, and higher capacity memory systems were needed for military and national security infrastructures, driving the technology initially for classified use, which eventually worked its way into the commercial realm. The pL5000 is a prime example of the kind of technology that had its beginnings in classified systems and subsequently ending up in the commercial marketplace.

The public introduction of this device had explosive implications for the the fledgeling electronic calculator industry. At the time, electronic calculators were somewhat unwieldy devices that took up a good portion of a desktop, and were very expensive because of their complex discrete transistor circuitry. Calculators were on the drawing boards of various calculator companies that used early small-scale bipolar integrated circuits that were available off-the-shelf from semiconductor manufacturers in the US(Signetics, Fairchild, Texas Instruments), and Japan(Mitsubishi), but these calculators were still many months away from market reality, would require a substantial number of integrated circuits, making them still rather complex devices to manufacture, and would still need some form of memory in the form of magnetic core memory (eg., Hayakawa Electric(Sharp), Mathatronics, Wang Laboratories, IME), some form of rotating magnetic memory (eg., Wyle Laboratories, Canon), or magnetostrictive delay lines(eg., Friden, Monroe, Sony, Canon) to store the working registers of the calculator. These memory technologies, while enabling the first few generations of electronic calculators, were bulky, sometimes cranky, and required complex circuitry to interface them to the calculator. There was a strong desire for integrated circuits to be able to replace these memory technologies, and advancements in ICs made apparent by GM-e's pL5000, albeit lacking in capacity, could replace these memory devices with a few ICs in the not too distant future.

Electronic calculator manufacturers pushing the IC manufacturers for ever smaller and more dense IC's quickly became the primary driving force for the advancement of integrated circuit technology. Discrete transistors, and very quickly even small and medium-scale integrated circuits simply did not have the density required to make the more capable, smaller, less power-hungry, more reliable and easier to use electronic calculators that the calculator market demanded.

While the US Space Program, Military/National Security infrastructure, and computer industry were the original driving force behind the development and use of early integrated circuits, once the electronic calculator hit the scene, the potential market for integrated circuits exploded by orders of magnitude, with initially scientific and engineering firms buying electronic calculators in volume, and later, with the price of electronic calculators continually dropping due to intense competition, small business and affluent general public quickly became potential customers, multiplying the potential market substantially.

GM-e would later go on to design and develop the world's first desktop electronic calculator using all integrated circuit logic, a device that seriously stretched the state-of-the-art in integrated circuit technology. GM-e's large-scale MOS chip technology made up the entire logic of the calculator. Each of the mere 29 chips that made up the logic of the calculator contained the equivalent of roughly 250 transistors(along with many diodes and resistors), a circuit density unheard of in the public sector at that time. The calculator developed and manufactured entirely by GM-e under contract to Victor Comptometer was put on the market by Victor as the Victor 3900. It was a machine a bit too far ahead of its time, and unfortunately the machines struggled with reliability issues from the beginning, which led to Victor canceling its contract with GM-e, GM-e being sold to Philco-Ford, and the Victor/Philco 3900 pulled off the market.

To read more about GM-e, and its development of the Victor 3900 for Victor Comptometer, read the Old Calculator Museum's essay, "The Victor 3900 -- History's Forgotten Miracle".