100000+ gates on a chip: mastering the minutia. II. Needed: a `miracle slice' for VLSI fabrication

Very large scale integration (VLSI) is perhaps the decade's most eagerly anticipated microelectronics revolution. Promised is an era of computational plenty: machine intelligence made practical by qualitative computation carried out at low cost. No longer need designers be guided by "conservation of hardware" dogma, which has held sway since computers were invented.