Re: We've come a long way...
Sorry, should have said that I meant 5 different kind of chips. I thought it was obvious that, given the low density of ECL you couldn't have things like single chip microcontrollers in ECL.
For those not fluent in IC designs, ECL essentially works by using transistors not as "fully switched" switches, but as amplifiers. So (in a nutshell) a one is one transistor having a higher output current than another, and a zero is the other transistor having a higher output current. Since both transistors will let current through, those chips burn _lots_ of power. However you can get them running at many gigahertz easily.
Burning that much power is what makes ECL rather useless for general purpose computers. It's hard to get that much heat away from those chips if you pack them densely. However you need to pack them densely to not have long transmission lines in between which introduce a delay into the computation. However there are specialist applications which are not general purpose where you can simply have a "pipeline" of stages processing some data. ECL is rather suited for this if you have a layout with controlled impedance and controlled line lengths.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
