Electronic Arrays

~ the last words ~

In July 1970 Electronic Arrays announced that it had put a four function calculator onto six LSI chips. Eight digits on the display, results carried internally to sixteen, a fixed decimal point, and six parts in standard 24 pin packages that cost just under $200 at announcement and $156.47 by the time you could order them. Each chip had one job. There was a register chip, a control chip, an output chip, an input chip, an arithmetic chip and a microcode ROM.

The company came out of General Micro-electronics. Jim McMullen left with colleagues to form McMullen Associates, which was renamed Electronic Arrays, Inc. in 1967, and it worked out of Mountain View making MOS shift registers and read only memory. The calculator set was what gave it a real foothold in the MOS business, and the plan was to sell that set to anyone at all, including small firms that wanted to be in calculators without paying for a custom chip design.

The plan changed almost immediately. An office machine importer down the street asked Electronic Arrays to build the calculator itself instead of just selling the parts, and the result was the ICM 816. The open market side worked too: the chips went into machines from Sony, MITS, Lago Calc and the German firm Walther. What did not work was the process technology. Electronic Arrays stayed on PMOS while Texas Instruments, Mostek and the Japanese makers moved to NMOS, which ran faster on less power, and single chip calculator engines from those companies reached the market before Electronic Arrays could ship its own.

~ the record ~

~ six chips down to one ~

Fabrication improved faster than product plans could keep up with. Electronic Arrays combined the arithmetic and register functions onto one piece of silicon and the set dropped from six chips to five, then to four, then to two, and eventually to a single chip.

The six chip version and its close variants did sell well while they lasted, which is why they turn up in calculators from several unrelated makers. The company made memory parts alongside them, and Electronic Arrays branded 2708 EPROMs are still being photographed by chip collectors half a century later.

~ the 9002 ~

By 1976 calculator chips were a commodity and Electronic Arrays tried to become a microprocessor company instead. The EA9002 was an 8 bit NMOS design released that year, and it is the only Electronic Arrays part that processor collectors bother with. It did not work. Production problems dogged the design, and in November 1977 Electronic Arrays gave up marketing it.

NEC bought the company the following year. The Japanese makers who had undercut Electronic Arrays with cheaper single chip parts now owned its Mountain View plant, which is how the 1970s semiconductor business usually ended for whoever was second.

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