Electronic Arrays, Inc. was a

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

integrated circuit An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...

(IC) manufacturer of the 1960s and 70s. The company originated when Jim McMullen and other employees of

General Microelectronics General Micro-electronics (GMe) was an American semiconductor company in the 1960s. It was formed by three former members of Fairchild Semiconductor, and is thus one of the "Fairchildren". It was acquired in 1966 by Philco-Ford and became their Mi ...

left to form McMullen Associates, which was later renamed Electronic Arrays, Inc. in 1967. They were best known for their series of

electronic calculator An electronic calculator is typically a portable electronic device used to perform calculations, ranging from basic arithmetic to complex mathematics. The first solid-state electronic calculator was created in the early 1960s. Pocket-sized ...

chipsets, starting in 1970 with the EAS100 four-function calculator. Implemented in six chips, rapid improvements in

semiconductor fabrication Semiconductor device fabrication is the process used to manufacture semiconductor devices, typically integrated circuit (IC) chips such as modern computer processors, microcontrollers, and memory chips such as NAND flash and DRAM that are pres ...

allowed them to progressively combine them in versions with five, four, two and finally a single chip. Although the EAS series was successful for a time, other vendors with more advanced processes entered the market and introduced single-chip systems before Electronic Arrays' own versions. They lost market share to companies like

Mostek Mostek was a semiconductor integrated circuit manufacturer, founded in 1969 by L. J. Sevin, Louay E. Sharif, Richard L. Petritz and other ex-employees of Texas Instruments. At its peak in the late 1970s, Mostek held an 85% market share of the d ...

and

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globall ...

, and later to a slew of Japanese companies entering the market, including

Hitachi () is a Japanese multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. It is the parent company of the Hitachi Group (''Hitachi Gurūpu'') and had formed part of the Ni ...

NEC is a Japanese multinational corporation, multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It prov ...

, and

Toshiba , commonly known as Toshiba and stylized as TOSHIBA, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Its diversified products and services include power, industrial and social infrastructure system ...

. The company attempted to change markets with the

Electronic Arrays 9002 The Electronic Arrays 9002, or EA9002, was an 8-bit microprocessor released in 1976. It was designed to be easy to implement in systems with few required support chips. It included 64 bytes of built-in RAM and could be directly connected to TTL ...

, an 8-bit

NMOS logic N-type metal-oxide-semiconductor logic uses n-type (-) MOSFETs (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors) to implement logic gates and other digital circuits. These nMOS transistors operate by creating an inversion layer in a p-type ...

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circu ...

released in 1976. The company struggled with production issues and gave up marketing the design in November 1977. The company was sold to NEC in 1978.

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Further reading