these RTL or what?

Allison <ajp166 at bellatlantic.net> wrote: It depends on what you're doing. ECL was perfect for custom-built lab and military hardware. Follow a few simple rules and even a bozo like me could reliably lay out the PCB's. Contrast that with 74F technology where you couldn't even figure out if ground at the center of the board was the same as the ground at the edge of the board :-). Above the onesies-twosies level things weren't so clear. There's a big leap between a back-projector or array-processor made at the onesies-twosies level and the world where VLSI becomes economical. Gate arrays helped span this gap but that gap had been pinched to nonexistence by the mid-80's. Minicomputer makers like DEC who also had their own fabs were in an odd boat... the process-leading CPU chips couldn't utilize the fabs built to deal with them because DEC didn't sell enough CPU's. In the end a vast army of interface and peripheral chips seemed to keep things churning well enough that they kept their fabs for many many years past where I was convinced they couldn't be economically viable. Tim.