The Forgotten Story of How IBM Invented the Automated Fab 2 years ago
In the early 80s I visited an IBM plant in France near Paris, and they were customizing gate-arrays by direct write on wafer, I think ion implantation, making the chips for mainframes on demand. From what I saw in the plant, they were doing chip design work locally. The only non-IBM equipment I saw at the plant were some very fast end of line test machines.
e.