MOSIS in the 1980s

 

I found some of the key history of the MOSIS Project I was looking for!  The table above is from a 1991 DARPA report, DARPA Technical Accomplishments. Volume 2. An Historical Review of Selected DARPA Projects, Accession Number: ADA241725. During the 1980s, MOSIS fabbed 12,201 projects (computer chips designed by researchers from universities, government labs and companies) in technologies ranging from 5-micron NMOS to 1.2-micron CMOS.  What an astounding total!  I wish I also knew how many wafers, chips, designers and organizations are represented by those numbers.

I also found two key annual reports summarizing all (most?) of USC/ISI for DARPA, 1980 and 1982.  Unfortunately the absolutely crucial year of 1981, when MOSIS went live, I have been unable to track down so far.  The 1980 report states:

In August 1980 MOSIS accepted designs for the first fabrication run using the software developed for automatic interaction with users. This run had 65 projects submitted by designers from 8 organizations: ISI, UCLA, Caltech, Jet Propulsion Lab, Stanford University, National Bureau of Standards, Carnegie-Mellon University and Washington University at St. Louis. These projects were packed into 18 dies on the wafer.

And then elsewhere:

After a period of debugging, the MOSIS system became operational in January 1981.  The MOSIS system accepts VLSI designs expressed in CIF [1] and handles all the fabrication steps needed in order to provide the designers with actual chips.

The original VLSI research staff were: Danny Cohen, Yehuda Afek, Ron Ayres, Joel Goldberg, Gideon Hess, Dave Johannsen,  Lee Richardson, and Vance Tyree.  Support staff: Victor Brown and Rolanda Shelby.

By the 1983 annual report, we learn that, "Over 40 universities and hundreds of designers now submit VLSI designs in electronic form via any network to MOSIS. MOSIS delivers chips and will soon deliver user-specified printed circuit boards to designers 30 to 35 days after receipt of a design."

The 1984 annual report lists 35 total MOSIS "runs": 17 4-micron nMOS runs; 5 3-micron nMOS runs; 11 3-micron CMOS/Bulk runs; and 2 3-micron CMOS/SOS runs.  By the time I began working at ISI in June 1986, runs were "closed" weekly on Thursdays.

It really was an incredible period in computing technology, and MOSIS was an essential contribution.  I was young (20, when I started working at ISI) and stupid (okay, I've still got that part), and so I had only the tiniest glimmer of how important everything going on around me was.

Now that I have found most of the hard data I wanted, I can update the Wikipedia entry on MOSIS!

MOSIS History: Help a Guy Out?

 If you're reading this, and you know anything about the early days of the MOSIS Project at USC/ISI, mosey on over to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:MOSIS and drop a note there.  I'm trying to enhance the article on MOSIS, but of course it needs to be documented history, not just, "I remember..." or "I think..."

If you don't know what MOSIS is, it's the Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation System.  It's a multi-project wafer fabrication service dating back to the early 1980s, and it transformed VLSI research in the United States.  (I've never understood why it was emulated aggressively worldwide, though a few other MPW systems have existed.)

I worked for MOSIS for a couple of years, though my job was on the compiler for the ICL programming language that most of the processing tools where implemented in.  I had basically nothing to do with the VLSI side or the production run side.

Image at the top from the March 1984 user manual, available at https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA139744.