Anamartic Wafer-Scale
Solid State Disk
C.1989
This storage module represents one of the boldest experiments in computer chip design. The underlying ideas came from engineer Ivor Catt, who in the 1970s developed and patented wafer-scale integration, publishing his work in Wireless World after rejections from academic journals. His “Catt Spiral” technique made it possible to use partially faulty silicon wafers, which would normally be discarded.
Backed by Clive Sinclair and major investors, Anamartic produced the world’s first commercial product to use wafer-scale integration—where an entire silicon wafer functions as a single “super-chip” rather than being cut into smaller components. Each pair of wafers offered 40 megabytes of storage, and four modules could be stacked to reach 160 megabytes, a remarkable capacity for the late 1980s.
Marketed to businesses running large-scale transaction systems, it was intended as a faster alternative to magnetic disk drives and offered access speeds up to 200 times quicker than conventional hard disks. The Wafer Stack won industry awards but was launched just as falling RAM prices and difficulties securing wafer supply made the approach commercially unviable.
By the early 1990s Anamartic was inactive, but its pioneering approach foreshadowed the solid-state drives (SSDs) now standard in laptops, tablets and phones. Modern SSDs use flash memory rather than wafer-scale integration, but the goal remains the same: faster, more reliable storage without moving parts.
Image: Featured in the cover story “Wafer-Scale Memories”, published in the Electronic Design, October 1989