IBM claims to have produced the first fully functional and fully tested, half-micron chips under the US Department of Defense Very High Speed Integrated Circuit programme, at its Federal Systems facility in Manassas, Virginia, and says that mastery of half micron design rules is an important step toward developing 16 megabit memory chips and chips that integrate hundreds of thousands of logic elements: the new IBM chips have a dual 16-bit multiply/32-bit accumulate architecture with logic functions operating at a 100MHz data rate, and integrate 37,000 gate equivalents; IBM is using VHSIC technology in development of the Common Signal Processor, an all-VHSIC Ada-programmable, signal and data processing system for the US Air Force; the Generic VHSIC Spaceborne Computer with the 1750A instruction set; and a Fourier Transform Module.
