Oh, my.
The schedule was insane, the chip difficult, the physics murky, and the company disorganized. Then they said the magic words "money is no object". I had a break in the schedule with I-Cube, so I said the fateful words "sure".
The component was simple but fiendish; the driver/sensor/filter/interface for a 3 axis fluxgate magnetometer, which would be used to sense the direction of the Earth's magnetic field and provide head orientation information for the VR helmet. Fluxgate magnetometers work by saturating a ferrite toroid with a high current, then looking for the voltage blip caused by the change in the magnetic flux from the Earth through the core. A one gauss change through a tiny winding produces a millivolt blip; we had to digitize three of those blips to about 16 bits precision and 10 bits of accuracy.
I brought in half a dozen more engineers; Pallab Chatterjee did foundry interface (we used AMI ), Mike Gentry did layout, John Cousins did magnetometer design, John Chmiel located vendors, Jerry Durand did some system design and board layout, and Joe Stupak did some materials consulting. We hit the project with the big hammer and had silicon by the end of July.
Meanwhile, the cover article of Popular Science was describing how the warehouses were filling with the Sega VR helmets, with hardware and game packages for the Sega Genesis systems. Uhh...
Also, we were learning "money was no object" actually meant that "money was nonexistent". The money flow stopped around July. Ono Sendai went bankrupt, lawsuits flowed, and so forth. Uhhh...
But the chip worked! 14 weeks from start of specification to working silicon! I learned that a good chip can get done very fast with the right team -- and to have someone to watch the money while I am buried in a design!