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Other British companies developed products for gate array design and fabrication. Qudos Limited, a spin-off from Cambridge University, offered a chip design product called Quickchip available for VAX and MicroVAX II systems and as a complete $11,000 turnkey solution, providing a suite of tools broadly similar to those of Ferranti's products including automatic layout, routing, rule checking and simulation functionality for the design of gate arrays. Qudos employed electron beam lithography,<ref name="electronicbusiness19861015_trends">{{ cite magazine | url=https://archive.org/details/sim_electronic-business_1986-10-15_12_20/page/46/mode/1up | title=An emerging market for British engineering tools | magazine=Electronic Business | date=15 October 1986 | access-date=2 March 2022 | last1=Coffey | first1=Margaret | pages=46,48 }}</ref> etching designs onto Ferranti ULA devices that formed the physical basis of these custom chips. Typical prototype production costs were stated as £100 per chip.<ref name="acornuser198604_qudos">{{ cite news | url=https://archive.org/details/AcornUser045-Apr86/page/n16/mode/1up | title=Universities choose chip design on Beeb | work=Acorn User | date=April 1986 | accessdate=10 October 2020 | pages=15 }}</ref> Quickchip was subsequently ported to the [[Acorn Cambridge Workstation]], with a low-end version for the [[BBC Micro]],<ref name="acornuser198609_qudos">{{ cite news | url=https://archive.org/details/AcornUser050-Sep86/page/n8/mode/1up | title=News in brief | work=Acorn User | date=September 1986 | accessdate=10 October 2020 | pages=7 }}</ref> and to the [[Acorn Archimedes]].<ref name="acorn_app155">{{ cite book | url=http://www.4corn.co.uk/archive/docs/AMPAPP/150/APP155%20(1st%20ed)%20-%20(1988)-opt.pdf | title=Hardware expansion and software applications for the Archimedes system | publisher=Acorn Computers Limited | date=September 1988 | issue=1 | access-date=25 April 2021 | pages=22 }}</ref>
=== Boom ===
While the market boomed, profits for the industry were lacking. Semiconductors underwent a series of rolling [[List of recessions in the United States|recessions]] during the 1980s that created a boom-bust cycle. The 1980 and 1981-1982 general recessions were followed by high interest rates that curbed capital spending. This reduction played havoc on the semiconductor business that at the time was highly dependent on capital spending. Manufacturers desperate to keep their fab plants full and afford constant modernization in a fast moving industry became hyper-competitive. The many new entrants to the market drove gate array prices down to the marginal costs of the silicon manufacturers. Fabless companies such as LSI Logic and CDI survived on selling design services and computer time rather than on the production revenues.<ref name=":1" />
Indirect competition arose with the development of the [[field-programmable gate array]] (FPGA). [[Xilinx]] was founded in 1984 and its first products were much like early gate arrays, slow and expensive, fit only for some niche markets. However, [[Moore's law|Moore's Law]] quickly made them a force and by the early 1990s were seriously disrupting the gate array market.
Designers still wished for a way to create their own complex chips without the expense of full-custom design, and eventually this wish was granted with the arrival of not only the FPGA, but [[complex programmable logic device]] (CPLD), metal configurable standard cells (MCSC), and structured ASICs. Whereas a gate array required a back end semiconductor wafer foundry to deposit and etch the interconnections, the FPGA and CPLD had user programmable interconnections. Today's approach is to make the prototypes by FPGAs, as the risk is low and the functionality can be verified quickly. For smaller devices, production cost are sufficiently low. But for large FPGAs, production is very expensive, power hungry, and in many cases do not reach the required speed. To address these issues, several ASIC companies like
===Decline===
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