Zentrum Mikroelektronik Dresden (ZMD) was regarded as the heart of East Germany's microelectronics research in the 1980s as well as its most advanced integrated circuit manufacturer.

Together with TU Dresden and VEB Spurenmetalle Freiberg, ZMD formed the foundation for Silicon Saxony, a cluster of microelectronics companies that came to include new fabs by Siemens (later Infineon Technologies) and AMD (later GlobalFoundries).

The company was founded in 1961 in Dresden under the leadership of Werner Hartmann as a research institute with the goal of developing technologies for manufacturing integrated circuits, following the seminal patents by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce two years earlier.

[1] Initially, it was named Arbeitsstelle für Molekularelektronik (Department of Molecular Electronics) and reported to the government's Office of Nuclear Research and Technology.

In 1965 the institute was moved to the combine VVB Bauelemente und Vakuumtechnik which was responsible for manufacturing almost all electronic components in East Germany at the time.

[1] Later that year in September the test chip C30 (two four-input NAND gates, 14 transistors, equivalent to the 7400 series 7420, 10 μm process) achieved a yield of 30%.

[8] By combining Institut für Mikroelektronik with VEB Elektromat Dresden (producer of semiconductor manufacturing equipment) in 1980, ZFTM was formed.

[9] The development of the megabit chip U61000 was much publicized at the time as proof of the capability of East German industry and the socialist system in general.

ZMDI innovations were used in automotive and industrial electronics, medical technology and for infrared interfaces (IrDA), for example in mobile phones and laptops.

The company had specialized in the design, production and marketing of heavy duty, mixed analogue-digital, application-specific circuits (ASICs) and systems on chip (SoC) with low energy consumption.