ADS Semiconductor

ADS Semiconductor, Inc., known industry-wide as ADS Semi was an American manufacturer of semiconductors and integrated circuits in Boston, Massachusetts. Operating under a United States defense contract since its inception in 1946, it was founded by engineers who had worked on defense projects during World War II.

In the 1960s, the company began offering custom designed and produced ICs as a service, initially limited to common 7400 series logic configurations. In August of 1968, seven months after the release of the Intel 4004, ADS Semi began producing the AC-1121, a custom arithmetic logic IC developed jointly for calculators created by two companies; Axicom Corporation and Sandy Electrico, making the AC-1121 the second ever commercially produced microprocessor.

By the mid-1970s, and with the rise of microprocessor technology reaching the mainstream consumer electronics sector, ADS Semi had become an industry leader in the development and production of application-specific integrated circuitry. Custom ICs became a valuable tool for reducing costs in the increasingly large-scale production of embedded electronics.

History
ADS Semiconductor was founded in 1946 by Vincent Allen Hayden and Eugene Scofield, two aerospace engineers who had worked

In 1967, the company began offering Single Chip Logic Configuration (SCLC) services, where a customer-specified series of standard TTL ICs could be purchased as one physical IC. In these early runs of the program, the IC was created by assembling the circuit with separate 7400 series dies inside of the package. This placed a strict limit on the density of the circuit, and once the program proved to be profitable, the company quickly invested in researching more compact methods of multi-die IC assemblies. Many of their early manufacturing techniques were conceptual precursors to the three-dimensional stacked IC, developed separately much later in the 20th century.

During the early years of the company's operations, many of their integrated circuits were manufactured in accordance with U.S. Military Standards, including the flatpack and the less common dual offset package, the latter of which was created by ADS in 1962. Beginning in the early 1970s and continuing well through the 1980s, ADS integrated circuits were most often 'metal can' style packages with DIP compatible pin configurations.