1978 · Computer-Aided Chip Layout · Work 905 of 1,871
A darkened chip design room in California, a large display housing of cream-white with a projecting hood and a recessed black front, in it a small screen with faint green lines and a large screen showing overlapping rectangles and stripes in red, green, blue and yellow, in front a flat pale grey metal digitizing table forty centimetres square, a designer in a brown corduroy jacket seen from directly behind, face turned fully away, moving a stylus on a cable across it, beside it a black keyboard of plain cream keys with two rows of small glowing red and amber lamps, behind in the dark a tall cabinet with tape reels behind glass.
What it was used for
Calma's GDS II was, in the Computer History Museum catalogue, "a turn-key interactive production graphics system for the design of integrated circuits" - a complete workplace at which a circuit's mask layers were laid out on screen. Steven Leibson describes what came before: Calma's first product was a large flatbed digitizer whose output went to punched cards or magnetic tape; from mid-1969 Joe Sukonick wrote software for the 16-bit Data General Nova 1200 minicomputer, which in 1971 became the interactive Graphic Data Station with a Tektronix storage tube display. GDS II arrived, per Leibson, in 1978.
What was new
What lasted was not drawing on a screen but what the drawing became: a file. According to Leibson the data format of GDS and GDS II is still the chip industry's standard for defining mask layers; he calls these files "one of the bedrock interchange standards". The barb is the company's history: in that same year, 1978, United Telecommunications bought Calma, about 30 months later General Electric did, and in 1988 the electronics business went to Valid Logic. The company was sold and its products faded from the market; its file format stayed.
What the sources leave open: The CHM dates the technical description consulted to "ca. 1980", not 1978; the introduction year 1978 rests on Leibson's article (EE Journal, 3 April 2024). Neither source gives prices, unit numbers or customer lists, nor do the reader comments under Leibson's piece; one calls Calma the most popular IC layout platform until the late 1980s, which Leibson questions.
Connections
Every connection names its kind. “Forerunner” on its own would be a claim.