Between the system on a pc board and the SOC (system on chip), the semiconductor industry tried to create a system on wafer. During the late '70s and early '80s, a number of companies, including Texas Instruments, ITT, and Wafer Scale Integration tried their hands at speeding the performance of electronics by integrating components in wafers. The ultimate goal was to create massively parallel processing systems. The market for the resulting wafer-scale integration saw much hype but little success.

No wafer-scale-integration company shot up and then flamed out more spectacularly than Gene Amdahl's Trilogy Systems. Amdahl left Amdahl Corp to create Trilogy. The company was betting on a wafer-scale-integration, 2.5-in. superchip to give it a competitive edge over mainframe competitors Amdahl and IBM. Trilogy raised more than $230 million in financing—an impressive amount of cash for the time—but it turned out that the superchip was too expensive to manufacture. In 1985, the company merged with Elxsi, which now owns restaurants.