The story
Electronic manufacturers were at that time forced to create custom integrated circuits due to the lack of industry standard ICs. MIL was an attempt to create a merchant company that could supply such standard devices as well as custom devices for Northern Electric products. Northern Electric entered the field partly at the urging of the Canadian federal government even though it had strong doubts of the viability of the company.
MIL manufactured both bipolar and MOS semiconductor devices, including standard TTL digital logic components and linear products such as operational amplifiers, as well as a variety of memory components. In 1971, MIL became a second source for the Intel 1103 DRAM IC. The licensing fee paid by MIL to Intel meant that Intel could show a profit in 1971 for the first time in its history.
MIL was never able to show a profit and losses were exacerbated by the semiconductor market downturn in 1974. It was purchased and folded into Nortel's research arm Bell-Northern Research and later merged into Nortel. MIL was purchased and folded into Nortel's research arm Bell-Northern Research in 1974. The MIL fabrication facility continued to operate as the largest semiconductor fab in Canada until Nortel's bankruptcy in 2009.
From Wikipedia’s article on Microsystems International, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4