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Text of the page (random words):
ost i did say almost pointless to try to find one they are in a word unobtainium there are also chips that are completely unknown you can hold it in your hand and know it exists but not what it is for some manufactures of chips this is pretty common brands like lsi motorola and vlsi made a lot of fully custom devices there is no documentation of what these are who they were made for or anything else such documentation would have been for internal use only and likely destroyed or lost by now especially as companies went out of business or got acquired intel was a company not known for custom parts but it s a bit of their history that got a bit forgotten they of course like other companies custom marked parts for various companies with special part numbers or markings burroughs hp att etc they would also make a part for you with somewhat different specs custom testing or speed rating intel did make completely custom products at least through the 1980 s we discovered one of these back in 2020 the intel n60066 8051 based asic at least in the 1980 s intel custom parts tended to have a part number like 60xxx i am sure you could spec whatever you wanted but if you didn t intel would just sequentially assign them some of them may reuse intel ip intellectual property like a mcu core or ram rom or be completely custom to the customers needs intel 60077 die note the duplicated blocks appears to be random logic on the left this particular one is marked 60077 and a copyright of 1988 which is marked on the die as well its a sample and in a package that reflects that a gold lead cqfp164 lead package its likely the production part would be in something a bit more economical but that would also be spec d by the customer looking at the die it appears to have a pair of each block perhaps for redundancy its hard to say none of it matches anything i have seen before as far as a microcontroller or processor its function and customer are a mystery it is in a word an unknownium and thats part of the fun of collecting tags intel asic posted in cpu of the day february 13th 2025 by admin soviet s first planar integrated circuits copy it around the same time that nikita khrushchev declared his support for building zelenograd a soviet student named boris malin returned from a year studying in pennsylvania with a small device in his luggage a texas instruments sn 51 one first integrated circuits sold in the united states a thin man with dark hair and deep set eyes malin was one of the soviet union leading experts on semiconductor devices he saw himself as a scientist not a spy yet alexander shokin the bureaucrat in charge of soviet microelectronics believed the sn 51 was a device the soviet union must acquire by any means necessary shokin called malin and a group of other engineers into his office placed the chip under his microscope and peered through the lens copy it he ordered them one for one without any deviations i ll give you three months chris miller chip war the fight for world s most critical technology chapter 8 in 1961 fairchild semiconductor patented integrated circuit fabrication technology that revolutionized the electronics industry the central idea of this technology called planar in mathematics planarity means a geometric image that can be drawn on a plane without intersecting lines is that the design of an integrated circuit is initially represented as a set of drawings these patterns are then sequentially translated onto a semiconductor material crystal using various physical and chemical processes photolithography etc early ti photolithography process duplicated and enhanced by the soviet engineeris the main advantage of planar technology which caused its spread in semiconductor electronics is the possibility of using it as a method of mass manufacture of semiconductor devices and allows you to reduce the spread of their parameters keeping specs consistent from one device to another early ti assembly process in october 1961 texas instruments announced the creation of rctl resistor capacitor transistor logic sn51x logical planar integrated circuits and in 1962 began mass production of them the sn51xz line was an enhanced version of the previous released earlier that year sn50x line the sn51x provided more power for fanout and speed about 10x faster ti was the first to release six sn510 sn515 chips early sn51x series chips sold for over 400 when first released in 1961 dollars today around 4100 ti sn502 read more posted in research february 1st 2025 by admin fairchild pps 25 4 bit cpu for 25 digit precision it s been a long while since i have been able to post write having a new baby apparently does that i missed that in the datasheet since i have neglected posting or forgotten lets continues with the forgotten ones this brings us to 1971 fairchild after losing many employees in 1968 69 who went on to start world famous semiconductor companies intel and amd amongst others has decided to make their own processor system this was very early in the era of cpus you had the intel 4004 the ti tms1000 and various calculator type circuits the pps 25 is a 400khz 62 5us word cycle time 2 5us bitrate pmos processor organized into several different chips it is a 4 bit parallel with 25 digit serial data thus the name programmable processor system 25 each of those 62 5us cycles is also divided into 25 micro instructions of 2 5us now what would a 4 bit processor need 25 bit data precision the pps 25 was designed to fill the void at the time between high end calculator chips and actual mini computers the pps 25 systems core is the 3805 alu and the 3806 function timing chips the 3805 dip18 includes the adder subtractor as well as a 25 bit register the accumulator this accumulator was maskable as well allowing different parts of it to be operated on with a 6 bit mask this allowed a great amount of flexibility in programming the 3806 chip the largest of the chipset a dip24 contains the timing and control logic two 25 bit status registers branch logic the instruction address register and various other logic functions to support this core is a pair of register chips the 3808 and 3809 registers these are basic shift registers and each contain three 4 bit bcd parallel 25 digit serial register memories instructions are stored in up to 25 256 12 bit serial roms the 3810 the address bus is 8 bits and the instruction word is 12 bits so with 25 chips you get 6400 instruction words of available instructions or constants 95 instructions were provided cybernetic mathiputer vintagecomputer net the pps 25 also supports the 3811 for handling output as well as the 3807 3803 input devices which support up to a 32 key keyboard 3807 or larger 3803 both these chips came in 40dip packages larger then the cpu itself this design was a bit complicated and took several chips so it did not see wide adoption fairchild de emphasized it by 1974 as they were working then on the f8 processor the pps 25 did however find its uses and inspired other designs as well hp considered using the pps 25 in its calculator designs before deciding to make their own cpu s in house saturn nut etc the design and programming of which bare a strong resemblance to the pps 25 one of the more known uses of the pps 25 was in the cybernetic mathiputer an early learning toy for children but its use was not limited to such trivial devices it was also used where precise math work was needed a walsh spectrum analyser design chose it above the what would normally be considered much more powerful intel 8080 largely due to its math capabilities 3805 alu 4 bit its turns out making a cpu function more like an advanced calculator allowed it to do advanced math fairly well it was also chosen for calculating sinc cosc values for an engineering system piper cheyenne ii another field where precise math is needed is in navigation and the pps 25 found a home here as well king radio corp now honeywell designed a radio navigation computer for airplanes in the 1970s based on the pps 25 around 500 of these were made and were found in such planes as the piper pa 31t cheyenne cessna 441 conquest ii and beech king air high end twin turbo props of the era interestingly king had difficulties sourcing replacements for these so a common upgrade to these nav computers was replacing the pps 25 with a custom asic and a motorola 6802 cpu posted in cpu of the day march 19th 2024 by admin national semi pace ins8900 test boards in 1974 national semiconductor introduced what is arguably the first 16 bit microprocessor it had a 8 bit mode as well which was more efficient but could run 16 bits as well this chip was made on a pmos process and ran at 1 3mhz in some ways it was ahead of its time there wasn t a ton of demand for a 16 bit processor at the time and interfacing to its pmos architecture was tricky the pace used 12v 8v as well as 5v it also required a high power 2 phase clock the clock drove the internal logic national was to use signetics and rockwell as second sources but neither ended up making chips this was a 2 way agreement as national was to second source the 2650 for signetics and the pps 4 pps 8 for rockwell the pace had a 10 level 16 bit stack and 4 16 bit general purpose registers it supported 46 instructions national semi ipc 16a 500d pace 1977 the pace found a very few design wins mostly used in custom applications where its speed and 16 bit were useful it was designed into a custom control system for a concrete batch plant and later in 1980 used by cern in switzerland to control a touch terminal used for particle accelerator experiments specifically controlling the modal terminal for the super proton synchrotron in this application its speed and its 16 bit capabilities were useful for the math functions needed cern eventually replaced it with the much easier to work with motorola mc68000 which had euro sources available a similar use was found by the australians dept of defense to control a graphics terminal also used for physics experiments cern nodal touch terminal powered by pace in 1977 national converted the design to nmos which simplified its interfacing and increased the speed to 2mhz this was the ins8900 which required 8vdc 12v and 5v but most importantly a normal single phase clock the ins8900 also fixed a few bugs some sources claim the ins8900 also added a nop instruction but this existed officially in the pace as well opcode 5c00 in addition sflg pflg 0000 can be used as a nop on either processor the ins8900 was used in a very early multi processor system designed by brato british rail automatic train operation this system was an early investigation of automating train track control and used three ins8900 cpus to provide enough speed and redundancy to run the 3 programs deemed needed automatic driver tachometer and safety supervisor each processor each program so all 3 processors eventually run all 3 programs and then the results are compared the ins8900 was chosen over the tms9900 because it utilized the bus much less the tms9900 user registers use external ram whereas the ins8900 has 4 general purpose internal registers resulting in less chances of bus interference between the 3 processors the ins8900d was also used in some sun not the sun microsystems motor testers used in automotive repair sops in the early 1980 s ins8900d 1979 early production large black die cap ins 8900d 1985 late production small gold die cap these processors are a bit obscure and as far as i can tell were not used in a ton of products they do come up from time to time though and the cpu shack now has a test board design available for them the board was a challenge to build due to the pace and the ins8900 having such different voltages and clocks requiring separate power supply panels to run each these are now available for pre order we re not thinking to generally stock these quite yet price is 159 and includes free shipping worldwide pre order now and i should be able to ship in around 6 weeks if there is enough interest i will of course try to keep 1 2 in stock for that time you find a nice white gold ipc 16 pace cpu posted in boards and systems cpu of the day february 14th 2024 by admin the rise and fall of philips data systems about a year ago mats danielson from stockholm sweden contacted the cpu shack about an interesting project documenting the history of philips data systems a former powerhouse of european computing previously we wrote about the spc16 micro used in some of these but mats has done a complete history his book is available for free at research gate the rise and fall of philips data systems it includes the spc16 as well as the history of much of swedish computing we re always happy to help out researchers be it with data or just pictures tags philips posted in research december 21st 2023 by admin the first mass produced dram of the soviet union in 1966 american engineer and inventor robert dennard invented dynamic ram cells single transistor cells each bit of information is stored in the form of an electric charge of a capacitor by that time mos technology was already capable of creating capacitors the presence or absence of a charge on a capacitor represents one or zero bits of information and the transistor can control the recording of the charge into the capacitor at the time dennard was working on a six transistor memory cell so he could only devote his spare time to his new idea after figuring out the intricacies of writing charge into a capacitor using a transistor and then reading it back through the same transistor dennard and ibm applied for a patent for single transistor dynamic random access memory robert dennard and his single transistor memory cell however the first commercially available dynamic memory chip the 1103 released by intel in october 1970 used three transistors per cell and separate lines to write and read data a single transistor circuit requires a sophisticated signal amplifier to read the data it was impossible to implement such an amplifier on a chip with the technology available at that time at the end of 1971 the 1103 became the best selling semiconductor chip in the world by 1972 14 of the 18 mainframe manufacturers in the u s europe and japan were using semiconductor memory instead of magnetic core memory the first commercially available computer the hp9800 was designed using the intel 1103 the first truly mass produced dynamic memory chip in the ussr was the 565ru1 a random access ram with a capacity of 4096 bits and a 4096 x 1 organization it is believed that the prototype for the 565ru1 was the 2107a chip released by intel at the turn of 1973 74 there is some similarities in layout to the 2107a but it certainly is not a direct copy the chip is comparable in technical characteristics to analogues tms4060 from texas instruments and mm5280 from national semiconductor therefore the question of which of the chips was chosen for copying remains open the soviet chip like its...
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