You’re guaranteed a story or several if you phone up Dr Gene Amdahl, whose latest venture is Andor Systems Inc (CI No 1,379) and our most recent call was no exception – IBM made an interesting announcement the other week, it was a PNP bipolar process with a fast switching time, he says: It used to be that you couldn’t make a fast PNP, but IBM has now made this possible; Complementary Bipolar (if you like) circuitry will mean much lower power Bipolar devices which will significantly outperform CMOS and BiCMOS, and even all but the largest scale GaAs circuits; at the moment IBM’s top end machines are made using Bipolar ECL components that take a lot of power and generate vast amounts of heat, hence its thermal conduction module; this will mean a number of other companies will have this technology soon and the entire industry will follow – that way we could end up with a 3090 600J and above on something like our single five chip set.
