Trilogy Systems
| Fate | Bankrupt |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1980 |
| Headquarters | Cupertino, CA, USA |
|
Key people
|
Gene Amdahl, Carl Amdahl, Clifford Madden |
| Subsidiaries | Elxsi |
Trilogy Systems Corporation was a computer systems company started in 1980. Originally called ACSYS, the company was founded by Gene Amdahl, his son Carl Amdahl and Clifford Madden. Flush with the success of his previous company, Amdahl Corporation, Gene Amdahl was able to raise $230 million for his new venture. Trilogy was the most well funded start-up company up till that point in Silicon Valley history. It had corporate support from Groupe Bull, Digital Equipment Corporation, Unisys, Sperry Rand and others. The plan was to use extremely advanced semiconductor manufacturing techniques to build an IBM compatible mainframe computer that was both cheaper and more powerful than existing systems from IBM and Amdahl Corporation.
These techniques included wafer scale integration (WSI), with the goal of producing a computer chip that was 2.5 inch on one side. At the time, computer chips of only 0.25 inch on a side could be reliably manufactured. This giant chip was to be connected to the rest of the system using a package with 1200 pins, an enormous number at the time. Previously, mainframe computers were built from hundreds of computer chips due to the size of standard computer chips. These computer systems were hampered through chip-to-chip communication which both slowed down performance as well consumed much power.
As with other WSI projects, Trilogy's chip design relied on redundancy, that is replication of functional units, to overcome the manufacturing defects that precluded such large chips. If one functional unit was not fabricated properly, it would be switched out through on-chip wiring and another correctly functioning copy would be used. By keeping most communication on-chip, the dual benefits of higher performance and lower power consumption were supposed to be achieved. Lower power consumption meant less expensive cooling systems, which would aid in lower system costs.
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