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It's interesting to note that this company was seemingly able to closely follow the west tech progress in the 70's but since the fall of the USSR, when they should have had a easier time given they were no longer prevented to trade worldwide, they instead started lagging far behind and they were still stuck on an early 90s level process (at 250 nm) in 2018 according to Wikipedia.

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It's one thing to build a few samples, it's another to mass produce with high yield. The GDR produced a 1 Mbit DRAM chip with great fanfare, but was never able to mass product it with commercially viable yield.

Even the great fanfare was completely overblown: This was old technology.

The GDR "megachip" was ordered by the central committee in 1986 and VEB Carl Zeiss delivered the prototype in late summer 1988. They were planning to put it into production at Kombinat Mikroelektronik Erfurt by 1990, but this never happened as the GDR ceased to exist.

For comparison: Toshiba had 1Mbit DRAM in production in 1984, by 1989 they were at 8 Mbit already.

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