General Micro-electronics

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General Micro-electronics (GMe) was a U.S. semiconductor company in the 1960s started by three former Fairchild Semiconductor engineers, making it one of the "Fairchildren." In 1966, Philco-Ford bought GMe and made it its Microelectronics Division. Led by Frank Wanlass as director of research and engineering, GMe became the first company to design, fabricate, and sell MOS (metal-oxide-semiconductor) integrated circuits. The first MOS chips were small-scale integrated circuits for NASA satellites. In 1964, Wanlass demonstrated a single-chip 16‑bit shift register with about 120 transistors, a large number for the time. That year, GMe began an effort to convert the Victor Comptometer tube-based electronic calculator to an all-IC form, the Victor 3900, aiming for a 1966 release. The project was tougher than expected and left GMe nearly insolvent. Philco-Ford bought the company, and Victor abandoned the product. The system was later marketed as the Philco 3900, but by then a cheaper alternative had appeared. Several GMe staff members later founded Electronic Arrays and created a six-chip calculator system that succeeded in the early 1970s.