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 earlier smaller-scale MOS integrated circuits that it continued on with into larger-scale devices.

This short news-byte concerning GMe'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. Even so, the device marked a huge advance in electronic storage density.

This device, when it became generally available in early 1965, is 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, significantly smaller, and 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, and used a lot of energy. GM-e's introduction of this technology (which was certainly 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 pL20 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 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 companies that used early small-scale bipolar integrated circuits that were available off-the-shelf from semiconductor manufacturers in the US, and Mitsubishi in Japan, but these calculators were still many months away from market reality, would require a substantial number of integrated circuits making them still complex devices to manufacture, and would also need magnetic core memory (ex. Hayakawa Electric(Sharp), Mathatronics, Wang Laboratories, IME), some form of rotating magnetic memory (ex. Wyle Laboratories, Canon), or a magnetostrictive delay line(ex. Friden, Monroe, Sony, Canon). for ever smaller and more complex circuit elements became the driving force for the advancement of integrated circuit technology, as discrete transistors, and soon even small and medium-scale integrated circuits simply did not have the density of circuitry needed to make the more capable, smaller, less power-hungry, more reliable and easier to use electronic calculators that the buying public demanded.

GM-e would later go on to design and develop the world's first desktop electronic calculator using integrated circuit technology, seriously stretching 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, with each chip containing the equivalent of roughly 250 transistors, a circuit density unheard of in the public sector at that time. The calculator developed and manufactured entirely by GM-e was put on the market by Victor Comptometer as the Victor 3900.

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".