Kombinat Mikroelektronik Erfurt

~ the obituary ~

The first microprocessor built in East Germany came out of Erfurt in 1977. It was called the U808 and it matched the Intel 8008, with no license involved. A year later the plant that made it became the parent works of a combine of its own: VEB Kombinat Mikroelektronik Erfurt, assembled in 1978 out of the breakup of the VVB Bauelemente und Vakuumtechnik, under a program the SED Central Committee had passed in June 1977. The parent works was the Funkwerk Erfurt, which in 1983 was renamed VEB Mikroelektronik "Karl Marx" Erfurt.

The combine ran from an address on the Juri-Gagarin-Ring in Erfurt and held about seventeen plants. The semiconductor works at Frankfurt an der Oder did bipolar circuits while the parent works in Erfurt did unipolar ones. Neuhaus am Rennweg made transistors and Großräschen made diodes. Stahnsdorf had power electronics, and Mühlhausen built the KC 85 home computers. Also inside the combine were the watch factories at Ruhla and Glashütte and a tube works at Rudolstadt, which is the kind of portfolio you get when a ministry decides who owns what instead of a market deciding it.

Erfurt was one of four combines holding up the republic's high technology program. Robotron in Dresden and Carl Zeiss Jena were two of the others, and the components combine at Teltow was the fourth. All four reported directly to the Ministry for Electrical Engineering and Electronics. Through the 1970s the microelectronics program got money and people out of proportion to everything around it, and the gap never closed. Experts put it at three to eight years behind the leading producers in components, and as much as fifteen years in finished goods. Those are the numbers the record keeps, not numbers anyone worked out afterward.

The thing that made the whole program necessary was CoCom, the Western export control list that cut the Eastern bloc off from the machines and the designs it would otherwise have bought. Turkey was in NATO, which put it on the side of that line where you could simply order parts. I grew up with the consequence rather than the cause: the chips in anything I ever opened came out of a supply chain that was allowed to buy whatever it needed.

~ the case file ~

~ the three fabs ~

Erfurt Süd-Ost is where the industrial capacity went. ESO I broke ground in 1981 and was finished in 1984, and ESO II came online in 1988. ESO III was being commissioned across 1989 and 1990, at the exact moment the country it belonged to was dissolving.

ESO III was the ambitious one. It was built for structure widths of one to 1.2 micrometers, for a 32-bit processor and for dynamic memory from one megabit up to four. Wafer production there actually started in 1990, under the Treuhandanstalt, after the combine that ordered the building had already begun to come apart. The plant worked. The economy it was built for did not exist anymore.

~ what came out of erfurt ~

The parent works made most of the republic's processors. After the U808 came the U880 from 1980, an unlicensed reimplementation of the Zilog Z80 that turns up in the PC 1715 and in the KC 85/2 through 85/4, and which was in very wide use by the standards of anything the republic made. From 1984 there was the MME U8000, a Z8000 copy that went into the P8000 from the Elektro-Apparate-Werke in Berlin-Treptow. Robotron's own 16-bit machines went a different way and used Soviet 8086 clones instead.

The last two never landed properly. Work on an 80286 copy started in 1986, reached production in 1989 as the MME U80601 and was meant for the EC 1835. The 32-bit U80701, intended for a MicroVAX II clone, was shown as a working sample in August 1989 and was supposed to go into volume at ESO III. It never did. The sample was shown three months before the Wall opened.

~ the breakup ~

Heinz Wedler ran the combine from the start until November 1989. His deputy Rainer Jüngel took over that month and held it through the conversion into a capital company. In 1990 the parent works became ERMIC GmbH and the remaining plants were pushed into a Treuhand holding called PTC-electronic AG, which was supposed to privatize or wind up seventeen businesses. Most of them were not economic in anything resembling a market, and after some back and forth the Treuhand resolved to dissolve the holding itself. Jüngel was appointed to run the liquidation of what was left.

Two pieces survived in a form worth naming. Thesys was founded in 1992 with around five hundred people building application-specific circuits, and X-FAB was founded the same year with about a hundred and fifty, doing CMOS, attached to the Belgian group Melexis. In 1999 the holding company Elex N.V. bought Thesys and merged the two under the X-FAB name. Outside the entrance to the Erfurt works stood a metal sculpture by the Weimar artist Eberhard Reppold, a hand holding a chip. The liquidation Jüngel was given finished in 2004, fourteen years after the country the combine was built for stopped existing.

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