Perhaps many people know about the inventor of the electronic computer – the second- generation Bulgarian John Vincent Atanasoff. There is a monument of John (some like it, some not) in the very centre of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria.

 

Very few people, however, know the role of Bulgaria in the development of the microelectronics behind the Iron Curtain and the role of Professor Yordan Kasabov in all this. Here are few facts:

 

The first Bulgarian MOSFET and corresponding IC were fabricated in Kasabov’s section “Silicon” in the Physics Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Science in 1965 only 4 years after the demonstration of the first integrated circuit in the Jay Last's group at Fairchild Semiconductor.

 

At this very early stage Kasabov and few others managed to convince the Bulgarian Communist Party in the importance of Microelectronics and in 1968 (the same year when Intel was established) Kasabov created the Central Institute of (semiconductor) Elements which in 1973 was renamed the Institute of Microelectronics (IME) Sofia.

 

Global recognition of Bulgarian electronics and technology was the winning of a gold medal at the Osaka World Show in 1970 for the electronic calculator Elka 42 based on Bulgarian MOS integrated circuits.

​

Kasabov established the annual International School “Physical Problems in Microelectronics”, perhaps the only forum when in the early microelectronics years experts from the West and the East can meet and exchange ideas.

 

When I joined IME in 1979 it had more staff than IMEC now. What happened after that is another story.