INTEL's early chip devolopment

If we compare the tools we had available to us 25-30 years ago to the tools we have today, we would definitely call that period the dark ages of silicon development. The steps for developing a chip back then and now are much the same in a broad sense: definition, logic and circuit design, verification, layout and mask making, silicon wafer fabrication (processing), and debug and test. But that is where the similarity ends. In …

…For one batch of parts, the oven temperature control failed and got to over twice that temperature before being shut down. When the burn-in boards were removed, the sockets holding the parts had melted down the boards like wax. The parts themselves were the color of toasted brown marshmallows. Incredibly, the vast majority of parts survived quite well with little impact on their performance. result: This essay tells about intel's chip development from 8085 to pentium