Trilogy Systems
More info
- Creator
- Gene Amdahl
- Released
- 1980–1985
- Type
- Semiconductor company (wafer-scale)
- Successor
- ELXSI
Gene Amdahl's bid to etch an entire mainframe onto a single silicon wafer — and one of history's most expensive technical failures.
Trilogy was founded in 1980 by Gene Amdahl, who had left his own Amdahl Corporation. The idea was wafer-scale integration: instead of dicing a silicon wafer into chips, the whole processor would sit on one wafer and thereby beat IBM on speed. The company raised around $230 million — enormous for the early 1980s. But yield, heat and defects made WSI unworkable, and the project was abandoned in 1984. In 1985 Trilogy merged with ELXSI, and Amdahl's wafer never became real.