Sinclair and the 'Sunrise' Technology: The Deconstruction of a Myth (33 page)

In other words, one of the most conspicuous weaknesses of semiconductor manufacture is the manner in which it has elected to deal with rejects. Chips are produced on 4- or 5-inch wafers of silicon, which are then chopped up in order to separate the working chips from a large number of rejects. The consequence of this process is that the working chips must then be mounted, wired and packaged in plastic before being assembled on to a printed circuit board (PCB). The wafer-scale concept seeks to do away with this costly and cumbersome second-stage development process.

The essence of the wafer-scale alternative is that the entire wafer is preserved (including the reject chips), and designed and tested in such a way as to obviate the need for a PCB. The process requires not the creation of a wafer containing perfect chips, but a method of testing and rejecting that results eventually in a sequence of working chips to be built up on the wafer. Faulty chips are rejected by electronic logic built into the wafer rather than by cutting the wafer apart.

A variety of approaches have been developed in an attempt to realize such a process, but the Catt solution can be summarized as follows. One of a number of possible entry points is selected on the wafer, and the first chip in the sequence is tested. An off-wafer tester feeds random data to the chip, and if the appropriate data is returned to the tester the first chip is considered to be sound. The next stage in the process requires the tester to instruct the working chip to open a link with one of four adjacent chips. Data is once again sent to the second chip via the original working chip, and if the appropriate data is returned then the second chip is considered sound. If the second chip fails to return the appropriate data, then the last working chip is instructed to open a link with one of its three remaining adjacent chips, and the test sequence is repeated. In this way, a spiral of working chips is established, in the end creating a one-dimensional array of chips that function as what is known as a ‘shift register’.

Now you don’t have to know anything about one-dimensional arrays or shift registers to get an intimation of the beauty of such a process. What wafer-scale integration achieves is a fully functioning component from a chunk of silicon that is riddled with nonfunctioning segments. The inherent economies of the process lie in the fact that the rejects can remain in place and that the working chips are formed in a working configuration that doesn’t need to be reassembled on to a separate PCB.

As far as investors in the US were concerned, Gene Amdahl was the golden boy of the sunrise industries. Having made his name as one of IBM’s foremost hardware designers, Amdahl had moved on to set up his own company, Trilogy, whose success in marketing IBM plug-compatible machinery had given ‘Big Blue’ serious cause for concern in the mid-1970s. Riding a tidal wave of success, in the early 1980s Amdahl announced his plans to design a new generation of supercomputers built around designs incorporating the as yet unconquered wafer-scale integration techniques. Everyone wants to back a winner, and Trilogy found no shortage of willing investors. US heavyweights Sperry and Digital Equipment came up with backing, as did the Bull corporation of France. At conservative estimates, more than $240m were pumped into Amdahl’s viable project.

By the middle of 1983, the American company was announcing positive results. The wafers it was producing were claimed to run more than 30 per cent faster than equivalent chips, and there were intimations that Amdahl had found a solution to the overheating problems associated with such circuitry. However, the reality of the situation emerged in March 1984. The supercomputer programme fell behind schedule for the second time and rumours began to circulate that the company’s wafer-based product would turn out to be only slightly faster than IBM’s best. By May 1984, Trilogy announced that completion of its revolutionary new product had slipped a further twelve months, and in June the company conceded defeat and scrapped the entire project. The only party with cause to gloat over Amdahl’s failure was IBM, who in the 1960s had decided that wafer scale was too difficult and costly a development to be a proposition.

In light of the experience of Amdahl, IBM, and Texas Instruments, Catt’s optimism seemed unfounded and his association with Sinclair Research insignificant. However, as far as Catt was concerned, the opposition’s failure to realize wafer scale was no more surprising than would be the failure of the wheel without the concept of the circle. According to Catt, Amdahl’s inability to bring wafer scale to fruition was a result of a failure to recognize the advantages of the technology his company was attempting to develop. Axiomatic to the Catt approach is the exploitation of the reduction in interconnections facilitated by wafer-scale integration. It’s generally believed that in the latter stages of its development, an Amdahl mega chip boasted an astounding 1200 pins packed on to its 2-inch length. As a consequence of the testing process outlined above, Catt’s wafer chip requires only two pins, since communication with the component is necessarily confined to the first chip in the spiral. Equally, entire wafers are rejected only if each one of the first chips at all the possible entry points reveals a fault.

The uniformly negative evidence seemed to suggest that the only hope for wafer-scale integration lay in the creation of fault-free wafers, the production of which, according to Gene Amdahl, will take more than a century to perfect. Unless, of course, one attached any significance to the theories of a crank like Ivor Catt...

To his credit, Sir Clive didn’t dismiss Catt as a crank, but identified with the inventor’s dedication to a project that had been rejected by the industry’s establishment for two decades. Sinclair’s support for Catt’s vision is multiply determined. In the first instance, having been shunned and scorned for his perennial devotion to electric vehicles and pocket television, Sinclair would have recognized and valorized the drive of a kindred spirit. Less emotively, Sir Clive’s consuming interest in developments that reduce production costs by limiting the component count would have stimulated his interest in Catt’s theories. (It’s no coincidence that the ZX81 was the first product to take advantage of Ferranti’s revolutionary development of ULA technology.) Finally, the logic and simplicity of Catt’s theories are so seductive that only the vested interests and hidebound conservatism of the multinationals could find reason to deny their experimental implementation.

It should be stressed that while the computer industry shunned Catt’s theories, over the years the inventor’s approach to wafer-scale development has found support from both the state and the academic world. The NRDC funded research that enabled Catt to develop his concepts to the stage where he was able to patent its implications, and at Middlesex Polytechnic Dr Malcolm Wilkinson headed a team that explored the practical implementation of wafer-scale integration a la Catt. Over the years, the combined assault on the industry by Catt and Wilkinson should have generated a positive response, but in the event ICL, GEC, Plessey and STC all turned down the project.

While Ivor Catt eked out a living for himself as a lecturer at Watford College, Wilkinson managed to persuade Burroughs to take him on as head of a team investigating wafer-scale’s potential. The team’s research reached the stage where the theoretical basis of the project was demonstrable, but further resources were required to examine the commercial viability of the process. Wilkinson’s group had produced a working wafer when the project fell foul of company politics:

The Burroughs wafer was very much a test structure. Exactly the time the wafer project was being viewed at Burroughs, very major structural changes were taking place in the company. There were a lot of people at intermediate levels who were very sensitive to these changes and thus not prepared to take risks or champion risky technical problems or projects. And at that time the wafer was considered to be fairly high risk, particularly since a lot of people who were coming into Burroughs were from IBM and were quite hostile to wafers. (Interview with Malcolm Wilkinson, 15 December 1985.)

In September 1983, Sinclair and Catt had a series of meetings at which the implications of wafer-scale development were discussed at length. As a result of these discussions, Sir Clive bought the rights to Catt’s patents, and took him on as a consultant. In February 1984, Malcolm Wilkinson left Burroughs for Sinclair Research and was soon joined by three others from his original team. The wafer-scale programme soon became the centrepiece of MetaLab research. In its heyday it boasted twelve full-time members headhunted from Plessey, Texas Instruments, STL and GEC.

By March 1985, the wafer team had made sufficient progress to convince Sir Clive that the fruits of its endeavour might well constitute the foundations on which Sinclair Research could re-establish its position as a market leader. The problem was, wafer-scale development took the company into the new area of component manufacture in which it had no track record and for which it required significant investment. To drum up financial support for his new endeavour, Sir Clive recruited the expertise and clout of old friend and ICL chairman Robb Wilmot.

Wilmot’s original brief was to seek out £50m worth of investment for the creation of a wafer-scale production plant. As far as the financial press was concerned, Wilmot’s arrival ensured that attaining the venture capital was merely a formality. In the event, the financial crisis culminating in the abortive Maxwell rescue chronicled above proved too much even for the ICL chairman. As far as the City was concerned, the combination of a Sinclair product and semiconductor technology amounted to a less than tempting package. However, although Wilmot severed his relationship with Sinclair Research in September 1985 without finalizing the investment package required for the wafer-scale plant, it seems that his contribution to the project was far from negligible. According to Wilkinson, it was Wilmot who recognized the potential of the wafer-scale development:

I think that there’s a lot of money to be made out of the wafer project, perhaps a lot more than Clive originally envisaged. I think it was Wilmot who eventually showed that the potential of all this is much larger than its effects on Sinclair Research. We could end up with a large semiconductor plant servicing a much larger range of the marketplace than Sinclair Research could handle ... Clive had simply looked at the wafer concept and considered how it would impact Sinclair products. I think what Wilmot did was to take the marketplace in general and ask how wafer scale would impact mainframes, telecommunications and military systems. (Interview, 15 December 1985).

While the announcement was lost in the collapse of the Maxwell rescue, the most compelling motivation for investment in the new Sinclair venture is that Wilkinson’s team has succeeded where the multinationals have failed. In May 1985, the group was poised to go ahead with the production of a half-megabyte wafer-scale memory for the QL. Then a slump in the memory market meant that standard RAM was being sold for less than cost price, and the Sinclair product was no longer economically viable.

At the beginning of 1986, Sinclair’s wafer-scale enterprise still appeared to be the company’s most promising hope for the future. Negotiations initiated by Wilmot seemed close to fruition, although at the time it seemed unlikely that Sinclair Research was in any position to achieve a controlling interest in any such enterprise. The situation was further complicated by the fact that Catt’s patents were in the hands of Barclays, part of the security covering the overdraft that was keeping Sir Clive’s company afloat. So although salvation appeared to be at hand, it was still possible that the company might flounder at the final hurdle. Malcolm Wilkinson put the situation into perspective:

It’s difficult in the context of Sinclair Research today to see how they can realize the benefits of the resource [wafer scale] quickly enough. They really need a product for this Christmas [1985], and the wafer is a long-term development, (ibid.)

Now that Sugar has removed the financial drain and distractions of the troubled parent company, and Barclays Bank has come up with the necessary funds to kickstart Anamartic, it’s up to Wilkinson and his team to prove that they really can take the world by storm. One thing’s for certain: the rewards that would accompany a successful realization of the product would make Sinclair Research’s heyday look like a depression. And as a significant shareholder in the company, clearly Sir Clive must have in mind precisely the kind of renaissance that success with wafer scale would bring.

[11] EXERCISE IN STYLE

For more than a decade, droves of optimistic journalists have probed Sir Clive in the hope that in an epigram of quotable copy the key to his success and survival will be revealed. Fortunately, whatever the current state of his corporate fortunes, Sinclair is never coy about spelling out the unique strengths, innovative business practices and revolutionary products that he sees as the foundations of his contribution to an industrial and technological renaissance. It is the promise of a new dawn that invariably occupies centre stage whenever Sir Clive is persuaded to expound on the course and inspiration of his endeavour:

We should face a Golden Age as fully intelligent machines appear, bringing immense new wealth. In the decades following the 1990s individual wealth could rival that of a Roman emperor. We will see, if war can be avoided, the most Golden Age man has ever known. (Futures, BBC TV, 7 October 1982.)

Implicit in such dicta is the revelation that fame and fortune have simply graced an avatar with the good sense to capitalize on the implications of his own visions.

When describing his interventions in the mostly stolid and unimaginative mire that is Western consumerism, Sir Clive regularly adopts the mantle of a new age prophet; a visionary intent on bringing the fruits of technology to the impoverished and endearingly ignorant masses: