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Yes, I was referring to 70's and 80's. Even today, I think, there are applications where 150 nm process is perfectly fine - RFID, transportation cards etc.

If you look at the 74 TTL series dies, they look almost primitive. But perhaps these were one of the first attempts at ICs, so it is expected.

When did transition from hand-drawn to computer-generated designs happen?



Around the mid 80s, for example the 386 was the first x86 processor to largely use standard cells.

It seems appropriate to cite Ken's blog post on the topic: https://www.righto.com/2024/01/intel-386-standard-cells.html


> If you look at the 74 TTL series dies, they look almost primitive. But perhaps these were one of the first attempts at ICs...

TTL wasn't the first attempt at ICs. Before TTL, there was RTL:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistor%E2%80%93transistor_lo...




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