Excerpt: "the relatively low cost accessibility to semiconductor fabrication using gate arrays. Chip manufacturers who needed high volumes to recoup their capital investments of hundreds of millions of dollars (now billions) had figured out a way of producing standard product families of chips called gate arrays, which were identical except for the last few steps of the production process which defined the interconnections. This enabled computer systems companies to buy state of the art fabrication by effectively buying batches of wafers on a time-share basis from a few thousand dollars upwards, instead of the millions of dollars required previously."