hensible robot in “Futurama”? Answer: MOS Technology’s 6502. What these chips have in common is that they’re part of the reason why engi- neers don’t get out enough. Of course, lists like this are nothing if not contentious. Some may accuse us of capricious choices and blatant omissions (and, no, it won’t be the first time). Why ’s 8088 and not the 4004 (the first) or the 8080 (the famed)? Where’s the radiation-hardened military- grade RCA 1802 processor that was the brains of numerous spacecraft? If you take only one thing away from this introduction, let it be this: Our list is what remained after weeks of raucous debate between the author, his trusted sources, and several editors of IEEE Spectrum. We never intended to com- pile an exhaustive reckoning of every chip that was a commercial success or a major technical advance. Nor could we include chips that were great but so obscure that only the five engineers who Microchips designed them would remember them. We focused on chips that proved unique, intriguing, awe-inspiring. We wanted chips of varied types, from both big and small companies, created long ago or That Shook more recently. Above all, we sought ICs that had an impact on the lives of lots of people—chips that became part of earth- shaking gadgets, symbolized technologi- cal trends, or simply delighted people. For each chip, we describe how it came the World about and why it was innovative, with comments from the engineers and exec- utives who architected it. And because we’re not the IEEE Annals of the History n microchip design, as in life, groping for more technology clichés to of Computing, we didn’t order the 25 chips

small things sometimes add up describe them. Suffice it to say that they chronologically or by type or importance; Clo c to big things. Dream up a clever gave us the technology that made our we arbitrarily scattered them on these “ Camenzind; topHans left: from kwise microcircuit, get it sculpted in brief, otherwise tedious existence in this pages in a way we think makes for a good

F a sliver of silicon, and your lit- universe worth living. read. History is messy, after all. ox F tle creation may unleash a tech- We’ve compiled here a list of 25 ICs As a bonus, we asked eminent tech- ilm Corporation. nological revolution. It happened with that we think deserve the best spot on nologists about their favorite chips. Ever the microprocessor. And the the mantelpiece of the house that Jack wonder which IC has a special place MK4096 4-kilobit DRAM. And Kilby and built. Some in the hearts of both , A

the TMS32010 digi- have become enduring objects of wor- of Intel, and Morris Chang, founder of ll R ig

tal signal processor. ship among the chiperati: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing h ts F utur Among the many great chips that 555 timer, for example. Others, such as Company? (Hint: It’s a DRAM chip.) R eserved; eserved; have emerged from fabs during the half- the Fairchild 741 , We also want to know what you think. A century reign of the , a became textbook design examples. Some, Is there a chip whose absence from our ma” TM U niversal/ small group stands out. Their designs like ’s PIC micro- list sent you into paroxysms of rage? and © 2009 proved so cutting-edge, so out of the box, controllers, have sold billions, and are still Take a few deep breaths, have a nice

so ahead of their time, that we are left doing so. A precious few, like Toshiba’s cup of chamomile tea, and then go to Th e e T wentiet flash memory, created whole new mar- http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may09/ K c Colle obal kets. And one, at least, became a geeky 25chips. There you can drop us a line h

reference in popular culture. Question: and check out the runners-up that didn’t Century

By Brian R. Santo What processor powers Bender, the alco- make the list and more favorite picks by tion

holic, chain-smoking, morally repre- other luminaries. 34 NA • iEEE Spectrum • May 2009 www.spectrum.ieee.org www.spectrum.ieee.org May 2009 • IEEE Spectrum • NA 35

Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Kansas Libraries. Downloaded on May 14, 2009 at 16:05 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. Signetics NE555 Timer (1971)

It was the summer of 1970, and chip designer Hans Camenzind could tell you a thing or two about Chinese restaurants: His small office was squeezed between two of them in downtown Sunnyvale, Calif. Camenzind was working as a consultant to Signetics, a local semi- conductor firm. The economy was At first, Signetics’s engineering tanking. He was making less than department rejected the idea. The US $15 000 a year and had a wife company was already selling com- and four children at home. He really ponents that customers could use to needed to invent something good. make timers. That could have been And so he did. One of the great- the end of it. But Camenzind insisted. est chips of all time, in fact. The 555 He went to Art Fury, Signetics mar- was a simple IC that could function keting manager. Fury liked it. as a timer or an oscillator. It would Camenzind spent nearly a year become a best seller in analog semi- testing breadboard prototypes, MOS Technology 6502 conductors, winding up in kitchen drawing the circuit components Microprocessor (1975) appliances, toys, spacecraft, and a on paper, and cutting sheets of few thousand other things. Rubylith—a masking film. “It was When the chubby-faced geek “And it almost didn’t get made,” all done by hand, no ,” he stuck that chip on the computer and recalls Camenzind, who at 75 is still says. His final design had 23 tran- booted it up, the universe skipped a designing chips, albeit nowhere sistors, 16 resistors, and 2 diodes. beat. The geek was , the near a Chinese restaurant. When the 555 hit the market computer was the , and the chip The idea for the 555 came to him in 1971, it was a sensation. In 1975 was the 6502, an 8-bit microprocessor when he was working on a kind of Signetics was absorbed by developed by MOS Technology. The system called a phase-locked loop. Semiconductors, now NXP, which chip went on to become the main brains With some modifications, the circuit says that many billions have been of ridiculously seminal like could work as a simple timer: You’d sold. Engineers still use the 555 to the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and trigger it and it would run for a cer- create useful electronic modules—as the BBC Micro, not to mention game sys- tain period. Simple as it may sound, well as less useful things like “Knight tems like the and Atari. Chuck there was nothing like that around. Rider”–style lights for car grilles. Peddle, one of the chip’s creators, recalls when they introduced the 6502 at a trade show in 1975. “We had two glass jars learning toy. In the Steven Spielberg filled with chips,” he says, “and I had movie, the flat-headed alien uses it my wife sit there selling them.” Hordes to build his interplanetary commu- showed up. The reason: The 6502 wasn’t nicator. (For the record, E.T. also just faster than its competitors—it was

Clo uses a coat hanger, a coffee can, and also way cheaper, selling for US $25 c kwise from top left: Hans Camenzind; “ Camenzind; topHans left: from kwise a circular saw.) while Intel’s 8080 and ’s 6800 The TMC0281 conveyed voice were both fetching nearly $200.

F ox using a technique called linear pre- The breakthrough, says , F ilm Corporation. dictive coding; the sound came out who created the 6502 with Peddle, was a as a combination of buzzing, hiss- minimal instruction set combined with a ing, and popping. It was a surpris- fabrication process that “yielded 10 times ing solution for something deemed as many good chips as the competition.” A

ll “impossible to do in an integrated The 6502 almost single-handedly forced R ig

h circuit,” says Gene A. Frantz, one the price of processors to drop, helping ts F utur R of the four engineers who designed launch the personal computer revolu- eserved; eserved; the toy and is still at TI. Variants of tion. Some embedded systems still use A Texas Instruments TMC0281 ma” the chip were used in Atari arcade the chip. More interesting perhaps, the TM U Speech Synthesizer (1978) niversal/ and © 2009 games and Chrysler’s K-cars. In 6502 is the electronic brain of Bender, If it weren’t for the TMC0281, 2001, TI sold its speech-synthesis the depraved robot in “Futurama,” as

Th E.T. would’ve never been able to chip line to Sensory, which dis- revealed in a 1999 episode. e e T wentiet K “phone home.” That’s because the continued it in late 2007. But if you [See “The Truth About Bender’s c Colle obal TMC0281, the first single-chip ever need to place a long, very-long- Brain,” in this issue, where David X. h

Century speech synthesizer, was the heart ­distance phone call, you can find Cohen, the executive producer and head

tion (or should we say the mouth?) of Speak & Spell units in excellent con- writer for “Futurama,” explains how the

Texas Instruments’ Speak & Spell dition on eBay for about US $50. choice of the 6502 came about.] 34 NA • iEEE Spectrum • May 2009 www.spectrum.ieee.org www.spectrum.ieee.org May 2009 • IEEE Spectrum • NA 35

Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Kansas Libraries. Downloaded on May 14, 2009 at 16:05 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. Microchip Technology PIC 16C84 (1993)

Back in the early 1990s, the huge 8-bit micro- controller universe belonged to one company, the almighty Motorola. Then along came a small contender with a non- descript name, Microchip Technology. Microchip devel- oped the PIC 16C84, which incorporated a type of mem- ory called EEPROM, for elec- trically erasable program- remote controls, and wireless mable read-only memory. It car keys. It was the beginning didn’t need UV light to be of a line of erased, as did its progenitor, that became electronics super- EPROM. “Now users could stars among Fortune 500 com- change their code on the fly,” panies and weekend hobbyists Texas Instruments TMS32010 says Rod Drake, the chip’s alike. Some 6 billion have been Digital Signal Processor (1983) lead designer and now a direc- sold, used in things like indus- tor at Microchip. Even better, trial controllers, unmanned The big state of Texas has given us many the chip cost less than US $5, aerial vehicles, digital preg- great things, including the 10-gallon hat, chicken- or a quarter the cost of exist- nancy tests, chip-controlled fried steak, Dr Pepper, and perhaps less prominently, ing alternatives, most of them fireworks, LED jewelry, and the TMS32010 digital signal processor chip. Created from, yes, Motorola. The 16C84 a septic-tank monitor named by Texas Instruments, the TMS32010 wasn’t the first found use in smart cards, the Turd Alert. DSP (that’d be Western Electric’s DSP-1, introduced in 1980), but it was surely the fastest. It could com- pute a multiply operation in 200 nanoseconds, a feat that made engineers all tingly. What’s more, it could μA741 Op-Amp (1968) execute instructions from both on-chip ROM and off-chip RAM, whereas competing chips had only Operational amplifiers are the sliced bread of ana- canned DSP functions. “That made program devel- log design. You can always use some, and you can slap them opment [for the TMS32010] flexible, just like with together with almost anything and get something satisfying. microcontrollers and ,” says Wanda Designers use them to make audio and video preamplifiers, Gass, a member of the DSP design team, who is still voltage comparators, precision rectifiers, and many other sys- at TI. At US $500 apiece, the chip sold about 1000 tems that are part of everyday electronics. units the first year. Sales eventually ramped up, and In 1963, a 26-year-old engineer named Robert Widlar the DSP became part of modems, medical devices, designed the first monolithic op-amp IC, the μA702, at and military systems. Oh, and another application: Fairchild Semiconductor. It sold for US $300 a pop. Widlar Worlds of Wonder’s Julie, a Chucky-style creepy doll followed up with an improved design, the μA709, cutting the that could sing and talk (“Are we making too much cost to $70 and making the chip a huge commercial success. noise?”). The chip was the first in a large DSP family The story goes that the freewheeling Widlar asked for a raise. that made—and continues to make—TI’s fortune. When he didn’t get it, he quit. was ntersil I nology; nology; e ch

Intersil ICL8038 Waveform Generator beat the phone companies in the 1980s. T ip

(circa 1983*) The part was so popular the company ch ro c

put out a document titled “Everything i Critics scoffed at the ICL8038’s lim- You Always Wanted to Know About M

ited performance and propensity for behaving the ICL8038.” Sample question: “Why B aker; . erratically. The chip, a generator of sine, square, does connecting pin 7 to pin 8 give M triangular, sawtooth, and pulse waveforms, the best temperature performance?” eft: eft: Janet

was indeed a bit temperamental. But engineers discontinued the 8038 in 2002, L op

soon learned how to use the chip reliably, and but hobbyists still seek it today to make T the 8038 became a major hit, eventually selling things like homemade function genera- into the hundreds of millions and finding its tors and theremins. kwise from

way into countless applications—like the famed Moog music * Neither Intersil’s PR department nor the company’s last engineer c

synthesizers and the “blue boxes” that “phreakers” used to working with the part knows the precise introduction date. Do you? Clo 36 NA • iEEE Spectrum • May 2009 www.spectrum.ieee.org www.spectrum.ieee.org May 2009 • IEEE Spectrum • NA 37

Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Kansas Libraries. Downloaded on May 14, 2009 at 16:05 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. ARM1 WD1402A UART (1971) Processor (1985)

Gordon Bell is famous for launch- In the early 1980s, Acorn ing the PDP series of at Computers was a small company Digital Equipment Corp. in the 1960s. with a big product. The firm, based But he also invented a lesser known but in Cambridge, England, had sold no less significant piece of technology: over 1.5 million BBC Micro desk- the universal asynchronous receiver/ top computers. It was now time to transmitter, or UART. Bell needed some design a new model, and Acorn circuitry to connect a Teletype to a PDP‑1, engineers decided to create their a task that required converting paral- own 32-bit microprocessor. They lel signals into serial signals and vice called it the Acorn RISC Machine, versa. His implementation used some or ARM. The engineers knew tion set, still remembers when they 50 discrete components. Western Digital, it wouldn’t be easy; in fact, they first tested the chip on a computer. a small company making chips, half expected they’d encounter an “We did ‘PRINT PI’ at the prompt, offered to create a single-chip UART. insurmountable design hurdle and it gave the right answer,” she Western Digital founder Al Phillips still and have to scrap the whole proj- says. “We cracked open the bottles remembers when his vice president of ect. “The team was so small that of champagne.” In 1990, Acorn spun engineering showed him the Rubylith every design decision had to favor off its ARM division, and the ARM sheets with the design, ready for fabri- simplicity—or we’d never finish it!” architecture went on to become the cation. “I looked at it for a minute and says codesigner Steve Furber, now dominant 32-bit embedded pro- spotted an open circuit,” Phillips says. a computer engineering professor at cessor. More than 10 billion ARM “The VP got hysterical.” Western Digital the University of Manchester. In the cores have been used in all sorts of introduced the WD1402A around 1971, end, the simplicity made all the dif- gadgetry, including one of Apple’s and other versions soon followed. Now ference. The ARM was small, low most humiliating flops, the Newton UARTs are widely used in modems, PC power, and easy to program. Sophie handheld, and one of its most glit- peripherals, and other equipment. Wilson, who designed the instruc- tering successes, the iPhone.

only too happy to hire a guy who was then helping establish limits of semiconductor manufacturing processes at the the discipline of analog IC design. In 1967, Widlar created an time, incorporating a 30-picofarad capacitor into the chip. ever better op-amp for National, the LM101. Now, how to improve the front end? The solution was pro- While Fairchild managers fretted about the sudden com- foundly simple—“it just came to me, I don’t know, driving to petition, over at the company’s R&D lab a recent Tahoe”—and consisted of a couple of extra transis- hire, David Fullagar, scrutinized the LM101. He tors. That additional circuitry made the amplifica- realized that the chip, however brilliant, had a cou- tion smoother and consistent from chip to chip. ple of drawbacks. To avoid certain frequency distor- Fullagar took his design to the head of R&D at tions, engineers had to attach an external capacitor Fairchild, a guy named Gordon Moore, who sent it to the chip. What’s more, the IC’s input stage, the to the company’s commercial division. The new chip, so-called front end, was for some chips overly sen- the μA741, would become the standard for op‑amps. sitive to noise, because of quality variations in the The IC—and variants created by Fairchild’s semiconductors. ­competitors—have sold in the hundreds of millions. Now, for “The front end looked kind of kludgy,” he says. $300—the price tag of that primordial 702 op-amp—you can get Fullagar embarked on his own design. He stretched the about a thousand of today’s 741 chips.

F could capture images at a resolution of

rom rom Kodak KAF-1300 1.3 megapixels, enough for sharp 5-by- T Image Sensor (1986) op: op: 7-inch prints. “At the time, 1 megapixel Ac

orn Computers; Computers; orn Launched in 1991, the Kodak was a magic number,” says Eric Stevens, DCS 100 digital camera cost as much as the chip’s lead designer, who still works US $13 000 and required a 5-kilogram for Kodak. The chip—a true two-phase external data storage unit that users had charge-coupled device—became the D

avid to carry on a shoulder strap. The sight basis for future CCD sensors, helping to of a person lugging the contraption? Not kick-start the digital photography revo­ F ullagar; ullagar; a Kodak moment. Still, the camera’s lution. What, by the way, was the very electronics—housed inside a Nikon F3 first photo made with the KAF-1300? K odak body—included one impressive piece “Uh,” says Stevens, “we just pointed the of hardware: a thumbnail-size chip that sensor at the wall of the laboratory.” 36 NA • iEEE Spectrum • May 2009 www.spectrum.ieee.org www.spectrum.ieee.org May 2009 • IEEE Spectrum • NA 37

Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Kansas Libraries. Downloaded on May 14, 2009 at 16:05 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. My Favorite

Gordon Moore cofounder Carver Mead and chairman emeritus of Intel professor of engineering and applied science, Caltech There were lots of great chips, but one that will always be dear to me was the , the My favorite chip contained only first commercial 1024-bit DRAM [introduced a single , although in 1970]. It was the chip that really got Intel over a remarkable one: a Shottky the hump to profitability. It was not the most ele- barrier gate field-effect gant design, having many of the problems that transistor made from GaAs memory engineers had become familiar with in (later called the MESFET and core memories. But this was comforting to such now, using more advanced engineers—it meant that their expertise was not semiconductor structures, going to be made obsolete by the new technology. Even today, when I look at the HEMT). I designed it over my digital watch and see 11:03, I cannot help but remember this key product Thanksgiving break in 1965. The very high mobility in Intel’s history. of the III-IV materials, together with the absence of minority-carrier storage effects, made these devices far superior for a microwave power-output stage. Despite my efforts to interest American companies, Lee Felsenstein the Japanese were the first to develop these devices. computer pioneer They have made microwave communications in sat- ellites, cellphones, and many other systems possible The humble, ubiquitous, and for many decades. quite inexpensive Signetics 555 timer had a big impact on my career, when I found myself using it to craft var- Sophie Vandebroek ious pulse-sequencing cir- chief technology officer, cuits, baud-rate oscillators, and ramp generators for my Xerox

My selection is Analog Jeff Hawkins Devices’ iMEMS accel- founder of Palm erometer, the first com- and Numenta mercial chip to significantly integrate MEMS and logic My personal favorite—a chip circuitry. Commercialized in that opened my eyes to what the early 1990s, it revolution- was possible—was the Intel ized the automotive air-bag 2716 EPROM, vintage late industry—and saved lives! Today this type of accel- earliest consulting clients. 1970s. The 2716 was nonvola- erometer is used in a variety of applications, includ- With a latch triggered by two tile, held 2 kilobytes of mem- ing the Nintendo Wii and the Apple iPhone. Other comparators, a high-current- ory, and, unlike many other types of MEMS chips are more and more present in drive output and a separate chips, used a single 5‑volt a broad variety of applications. open-collector output for power supply, so it could be discharging capacitors, the used as storage in a small 555 offered a wide range of and practical package. Of uses with the addition of a course, its big disadvantage Steve Jurvetson few analog components. It was that you needed a UV managing director of suggested that it could pro- light to erase it. But with a vide more than it delivered little imagination you could Draper Fisher Jurvetson

at times, which helped me see that one day it could all erox X refine my understanding of be done electrically. In some The was a the limits of a chip and the sense the 2716 is the great- special one. I built a speaking entures; umenta; umenta;

computer with it. I also wrote V

need to consider its operation grandparent of today’s flash N in the analog domain. memory chips. a multitasker in assembler. That chip was the workhorse osla Kh ; of learning back during my j elsenstein; F M.S.E.E. days. But wait— mpin I ee

other chips come to mind. L

founder of TSMC C; Morris Chang ntel; I also like ZettaCore’s first I TSM

1‑megabyte molecular memory chip, D-Wave’s solid- eft: L

One of my favorite great microchips is the Intel 1103, le;

state 128-qubit quantum computer processor, the O op

1‑kilobit DRAM, circa 1970. Reasons: one, huge com- T (I’ve got an 8-inch signed by Andy eino

mercial success; two, started Intel on its way; three, L Grove in my office), the Canon EOS 5D 12.8-megapixel demonstrated the power of MOS technology (versus CMOS sensor, and the iTV 5-bit asynchronous pro- itzel;

bipolar); and four, opened up at least another 40 years D cessor running Forth and a custom OS—whew! kwise from of life for Moore’s Law. c avid avid Clo D 38 NA • iEEE Spectrum • May 2009 www.spectrum.ieee.org www.spectrum.ieee.org May 2009 • IEEE Spectrum • NA 39

Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Kansas Libraries. Downloaded on May 14, 2009 at 16:05 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. IBM Deep Blue 2 Chess Chip (1997)

On one side of the board, 1.5 kilograms of gray matter. On the other side, 480 chess chips. Humans finally fell to computers in 1997, when IBM’s chess-playing com- puter, Deep Blue, beat the reigning world Vinod Khosla champion, Garry Kasparov. Each of cofounder of Sun Deep Blue’s chips consisted of 1.5 million Microsystems and arranged into specialized ­partner at Kleiner, Perkins, blocks—like a move-generator logic Caufield & Byers array—as well as some RAM and ROM. Deep Blue decisive—Kasparov called Together, the chips could churn through them “uncomputerlike”—moves. “They 200 million chess positions per second. exerted great psychological pressures,” That brute-force power, combined with recalls Deep Blue’s mastermind, Feng- clever game-evaluation functions, gave hsiung Hsu, now at .

Texas Instruments Digital Micromirror The Motorola 68010 was my favorite chip. With its Device (1987) power and virtual mem- On 18 June 1999, Larry ory support, it said to the world, “Microprocessors Hornbeck took his wife, Laura, can stand and compete with on a date. They went to watch the big boys—the minis and Star Wars: Episode 1—The ­mainframes.” Phantom Menace at a theater in Burbank, Calif. Not that the graying engineer was an avid Jedi fan. The reason they were there was actually the projec- tor. It used a chip—the digi- tal micromirror device—that Hornbeck had invented at Texas Instruments. The chip Transmeta Corp. uses millions of hinged micro- Crusoe Processor (2000) scopic mirrors to direct light through a projection lens. The David Ditzel With great power come great screening was “the first digital Intel’s chief architect for heat sinks. And short battery life. And exhibition of a major motion hybrid parallel computing crazy electricity consumption. Hence picture,” says Hornbeck, a TI Transmeta’s goal of designing a low- Fellow. Now movie projectors My favorite chip: the 6502 power processor that’d put those hogs using this digital light-process- from MOS Technology. offered by Intel and AMD to shame. ing technology—or DLP, as TI This 8-bit microproces- sor was used by me and The plan: Software would translate branded it—are used in thou- many hobbyists for build- instructions on the fly into Crusoe’s own sands of theaters. It’s also used F ing our own computers rom machine code, whose higher level of paral- in rear-projection TVs, office

[above, me and my home- T op: op: lelism would save time and power. It was projectors, and tiny projectors made PC in 1977]. I wrote a A

dam dam hyped as the greatest thing since sliced sil- for cellphones. “To para- small that icon, and for a while, it was. “Engineering phrase Houdini,” Hornbeck fit in 4 kilobytes, and Tiny N adel/ BASIC from Tom Pittman Wizards Conjure Up Processor Gold” was says, “micromirrors, gen-

fit in 2 KB. The reason it AP how IEEE Spectrum’s May 2000 cover tlemen. The effect is created

was a great chip was that in Ph oto; put it. Crusoe and its successor, Efficeon, with micromirrors.” the 8-bit era, you could use the first 256 bytes of mem- IEEE “proved that dynamic binary translation

S was commercially viable,” says David

ory as 128 16-bit pointers c pe

to index from, making this trum; Ditzel, Transmeta’s cofounder, now at Intel. machine much easier to pro- Unfortunately, he adds, the chips arrived

gram than other 8-bit alter- T exas several years before the market for low- natives. It was a big deal I when you had to enter your nstruments power computers took off. In the end, while programs in Transmeta did not deliver on its prom- binary form. ises, it did force Intel and AMD—through licenses and lawsuits—to chill out. 38 NA • iEEE Spectrum • May 2009 www.spectrum.ieee.org www.spectrum.ieee.org May 2009 • IEEE Spectrum • NA 39

Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Kansas Libraries. Downloaded on May 14, 2009 at 16:05 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. Micronas Semiconductor MAS3507 MP3 Decoder (1997)

Before the iPod, there was the Diamond Rio PMP300. Not that you’d remember. Launched in 1998, the PMP300 became an instant hit, but then the hype faded faster than Milli Vanilli. One thing, though, was notable about the player. It carried the MAS3507 MP3 decoder chip—a RISC-based digital signal pro- cessor with an instruc- tion set optimized for audio compression and decompression. The chip, developed by Micronas, let the Rio squeeze about a dozen songs onto its flash memory—laughable today but at the time just Intel 8088 enough to compete with portable CD players. Quaint, huh? The Microprocessor (1979) Rio and its successors paved the way for the iPod, and now you can carry thousands of songs—and all of Milli Vanilli’s albums Was there any one chip that propelled Intel and music videos—in your pocket. into the Fortune 500? Intel says there was: the 8088. This was the 16-bit CPU that IBM chose for its original PC line, which went on to dominate Mostek MK4096 4-Kilobit DRAM (1973) the desktop computer market. In an odd twist of fate, the chip that established Mostek wasn’t the first to put out a DRAM. Intel what would become known as the x86 architec- was. But Mostek’s 4-kilobit DRAM chip brought about a key ture didn’t have a name appended with an “86.” innovation, a circuitry trick called address multiplexing, con- The 8088 was basically just a slightly modified cocted by Mostek cofounder Bob 8086, Intel’s first 16-bit CPU. Or as Intel engineer Proebsting. Basically, the chip Stephen Morse once put it, the 8088 was “a cas- used the same pins to access the trated version of the 8086.” That’s because the memory’s rows and columns new chip’s main innovation wasn’t exactly a step by multiplexing the address- forward in technical terms: The 8088 processed ing signals. As a result, the chip data in 16-bit words, but it used an 8-bit exter- wouldn’t require more pins as

nal data . memory density increased and ostek M

Intel managers kept the 8088 project under could be made for less money. om; wraps until the 8086 design was mostly com- There was just a little compati­ c plete. “Management didn’t want to delay the 8086 bility problem. The 4096 used

by even a day by even telling us they had the 8088 16 pins, whereas the memories eim/eirikso. h ol

variant in mind,” says Peter A. Stoll, a lead engi- made by Texas Instruments, S

neer for the 8086 project who did some work on Intel, and Motorola had 22 pins. irik E the 8088—a “one-day task force to fix a What followed was one of the most epic face-offs in DRAM history. bug that took three days.” With Mostek betting its future on the chip, its executives set out to ntel Corp.; It was only after the first functional 8086 came proselytize customers, partners, the press, and even its staff. Fred I eft: eft:

out that Intel shipped the 8086 artwork and docu- K. Beckhusen, who as a recent hire was drafted to test the 4096 L op

mentation to a design unit in Haifa, Israel, where devices, recalls when Proebsting and chief executive L.J. Sevin T two engineers, Rafi Retter and Dany Star, altered came to his night shift to give a seminar—at 2 a.m. “They boldly the chip to an 8-bit bus. predicted that in six months no one would hear or care about

The modification proved to be one of Intel’s 22‑pin DRAM,” Beckhusen says. They were right. The 4096 and kwise from c

best decisions. The 29 000-transistor 8088 CPU its successors became the dominant DRAM for years. Clo required fewer, less expensive support chips than the 8086 and had “full compatibility with 8-bit hardware, while also providing faster processing and a smooth transition to 16-bit processors,” as XC2064 FPGA (1985) Intel’s Robert Noyce and Ted Hoff wrote in a 1981 article for IEEE Micro magazine. Back in the early came up with a chip packed The first PC to use the 8088 was IBM’s Model 1980s, chip designers tried to with transistors that formed 5150, a monochrome machine that cost US $3000. get the most out of each and loosely organized logic blocks Now almost all the world’s PCs are built around every transistor on their cir- that in turn could be config- CPUs that can claim the 8088 as an ancestor. Not cuits. But then Ross Freeman ured and reconfigured with bad for a castrated chip. had a pretty radical idea. He software. Sometimes a 40 NA • iEEE Spectrum • May 2009 www.spectrum.ieee.org www.spectrum.ieee.org May 2009 • IEEE Spectrum • NA 41

Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Kansas Libraries. Downloaded on May 14, 2009 at 16:05 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. Z80 , another Microprocessor (1976) ex-Intel engineer, worked 80-hour weeks hunched over Federico Faggin knew tables, drawing the Z80 cir- well the kind of money and cuits. Faggin soon learned man-hours it took to market that when it comes to micro- a microprocessor. While at chips, small is beautiful—but Intel, he had contributed to it can hurt your eyes. SPARC Processor (1987) the designs of two seminal “By the end I had to get There was a time, long ago (the early 1980s), specimens: the primordial glasses,” he says. “I became when people wore neon-colored leg warmers and 4004, and the 8080, of Altair nearsighted.” watched “Dallas,” and microprocessor architects sought fame. So when he founded The team toiled through to increase the complexity of CPU instructions as a way Zilog with former Intel col- 1975 and into 1976. In March of getting more accomplished in each compute cycle. But league Ralph Ungermann, of that year, they finally then a group at the University of California, Berkeley, they decided to start with had a prototype chip. The always a bastion of counterculture, called for the opposite: something simpler: a single- Z80 was a contemporary of Simplify the instruction set, they said, and you’ll process chip microcontroller. MOS Technology’s 6502, and instructions at a rate so fast you’ll more than compen- Faggin and Ungermann like that chip, it stood out not sate for doing less each cycle. The Berkeley group, led by David Patterson, called their approach RISC, for reduced- instruction-set computing. As an academic study, RISC sounded great. But was it marketable? Sun Microsystems bet on it. In 1984, a small team of Sun engineers set out to develop a 32-bit RISC processor called SPARC (for Scalable Processor Architecture). The idea was to use the chips in a new line of workstations. One day, Scott McNealy, then Sun’s rented an office in downtown only for its elegant design CEO, showed up at the SPARC development lab. “He Los Altos, Calif., drafted a busi- but also for being dirt cheap said that SPARC would take Sun from a $500-million-a- ness plan, and went looking for (about US $25). Still, getting year company to a billion-dollar-a-year company,” recalls venture capital. They ate lunch the product out the door took Patterson, a consultant to the SPARC project. at a nearby Safeway super­ a lot of convincing. “It was If that weren’t pressure enough, many outside Sun market—“Camembert cheese just an intense time,” says had expressed doubt the company could pull it off. Worse and crackers,” he recalls. Faggin, who developed an still, Sun’s marketing team had had a terrifying realiza- But the engineers soon ulcer as well. tion: SPARC spelled backward was…CRAPS! Team realized that the microcon- But the sales eventu- members had to swear they would not utter that word troller market was crowded ally came through. The to anyone even inside Sun—lest the word get out to arch­ with very good chips. Even Z80 ended up in thousands rival MIPS Technologies, which was also exploring the if theirs was better than the of products, including the RISC concept. others, they’d see only slim Osborne I (the first por- The first version of the minimalist SPARC consisted of profits—and continue lunch- table, or “luggable,” com- a “20 000-gate-array processor without even integer mul-

left: left: ing on cheese and crackers. puter), and the Radio Shack tiply/divide instructions,” says Robert Garner, the lead

c Zilog had to aim higher on TRS‑80 and MSX home com- SPARC architect and now an IBM researcher. Yet, at 10 pu-world. the food chain, so to speak, puters, as well as printers, million , it ran about three times and the Z80 microprocessor fax machines, photocopiers, as fast as the complex-instruction-set computer (CISC) c

om; rig om; project was born. modems, and satellites. Zilog processors of the day. The goal was to outper- still makes the Z80, which is Sun would use SPARC to power profitable work­ h

t: form the 8080 and also offer popular in some embedded stations and servers for years to come. The first SPARC- R obert obert full compatibility with 8080 systems. In a configu- based product, introduced in 1987, was the Sun-4 line of software, to lure customers ration today it costs $5.73— workstations, which quickly dominated the market and G arner away from Intel. For months, not even as much as a cheese- helped propel the company’s revenues past the billion- Faggin, Ungermann, and and-crackers lunch. dollar mark—just as McNealy had prophesied.

of transistors wouldn’t be Xilinx. (Apparently, a weird using XC2064’s logic blocks, was only too happy to help used—heresy!—but Freeman concept called for a weird just as Xilinx customers would. the boss. “There we were,” he was betting that Moore’s Law company name.) When the Bill Carter, a former chief tech- says, “with paper and colored would eventually make tran- ­company’s first product, the nology officer, recalls being pencils, working on Bernie’s sistors really cheap. It did. To XC2064, came out in 1985, approached by CEO Bernie assignment!” Today FPGAs— market the chip, called a field- employees were given an Vonderschmitt, who said he sold by Xilinx and others—are programmable gate array, or assignment: They had to draw was having “a little difficulty used in just too many things to FPGA, Freeman cofounded by hand an example circuit doing his homework.” Carter list here. Go reconfigure! 40 NA • iEEE Spectrum • May 2009 www.spectrum.ieee.org www.spectrum.ieee.org May 2009 • IEEE Spectrum • NA 41

Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Kansas Libraries. Downloaded on May 14, 2009 at 16:05 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. Amati Communications Overture ADSL Chip Set (1994)

Remember when DSL came along and you chucked that pathetic 56.6-kilobit-per-second modem into the trash? You and the two-thirds of the world’s broadband users who use DSL should thank Amati Communications, a start-up out of . In the 1990s, it came up with a DSL modulation approach called discrete multi­ Tripath Technology tone, or DMT. It’s basically a way of making one phone line look like hundreds of subchannels and improving TA2020 Audio transmission using an inverse Robin Hood strategy. “Bits Amplifier (1998) are robbed from the poorest channels and given to the wealthiest channels,” says John M. Cioffi, a cofounder of Amati and now an engi- There’s a subset of neering professor at Stanford. DMT beat competing approaches—including ones from audiophiles who insist that giants like AT&T—and became a global standard for DSL. In the mid-1990s, Amati’s vacuum –based ampli- DSL chip set (one analog, two digital) sold in modest quantities, but by 2000, volume fiers produce the best sound had increased to millions. In the early 2000s, sales exceeded 100 million chips per and always will. So when year. Texas Instruments bought Amati in 1997. some in the audio commu- nity claimed that a solid-state class-D amp concocted by a company called Tripath Technology delivered sound as warm and vibrant as tube amps, it was a big deal. Tripath’s trick was to use a 50-megahertz sampling Motorola MC68000 Microprocessor (1979)

system to drive the amplifier. atnagar The company boasted that Motorola was late to the 16-bit micro­ find a credit-card-size copy of the flow- Bh avi avi its TA2020 performed better processor party, so it decided to arrive in charts sitting on my desk,” Tredennick R and cost much less than any style. The hybrid 16-bit/32-bit MC68000 recalls. The 68000 found its way into all useum; comparable solid-state amp. packed in 68 000 transistors, more than the early computers, as well M To show off the chip at trade double the number of Intel’s 8086. It had as the and the Atari ST. Big sales shows, “we’d play that song— internal 32‑bit registers, but a 32-bit bus numbers came from embedded applica- that very romantic one from would have made it prohibitively expen- tions in laser printers, arcade games, and Titanic,” says Adya Tripathi, sive, so the 68000 used 24-bit address industrial controllers. But the 68000 was

Tripath’s founder. Like most and 16-bit data lines. The 68000 seems also the subject of one of history’s great- Computerow; History h class-D amps, the 2020 was to have been the last major processor est near misses, right up there with Pete eter C very power efficient; it didn’t designed using pencil and paper. “I cir- Best losing his spot as a drummer for the P ; require a heat sink and culated reduced-size copies of flowcharts, Beatles. IBM wanted to use the 68000 in h ripat

could use a compact package. execution-unit resources, decoders, and its PC line, but the company went with T Tripath’s low-end, 15-watt control logic to other project members,” Intel’s 8088 because, among other things, version of the TA2020 sold for says Nick Tredennick, who designed the 68000 was still relatively scarce. US $3 and was used in boom the 68000’s logic. The copies were small As one observer later reflected, had boxes and ministereos. Other and difficult to read, and his bleary-eyed Motorola prevailed, the Windows-Intel kwise fromleft: top

versions—the most powerful colleagues found a way to make that ­duopoly known as Wintel might have c

had a 1000-W output—were clear. “One day I came into my office to been Winola instead. Clo used in home theaters, high- end audio systems, and TV sets by Sony, Sharp, Toshiba, and others. Eventually, the big semiconductor compa- Chips & Technologies AT Chip Set (1985) nies caught up, creating simi- lar chips and sending Tripath By 1984, when IBM introduced its 80286 AT line of PCs, into oblivion. Its chips, how- the company was already emerging as the clear winner in ever, developed a devoted desktop computers—and it intended to maintain its domi- cult following. Audio-amp nance. But Big Blue’s plans were foiled by a tiny company kits and products based on called Chips & Technologies, in San Jose, Calif. C&T devel- the TA2020 are still available oped five chips that duplicated the functionality of the AT from such companies as 41 Hz motherboard, which used some 100 chips. To make sure Audio, Sure Electronics, and the chip set was compatible with the IBM PC, the C&T Winsome Labs. engineers figured there was just one thing to do. “We had 42 NA • iEEE Spectrum • May 2009 www.spectrum.ieee.org

Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Kansas Libraries. Downloaded on May 14, 2009 at 16:05 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. Computer Cowboys Sh-Boom Toshiba NAND Flash Memory (1989) Processor (1988) The SAGA THAT is the invention into production and Two chip designers walk into a bar. They invention of flash memory watched as the money poured are Russell H. Fish III and Chuck H. Moore, and the began when a Toshiba fac- in, you don’t know much bar is called Sh-Boom. No, this is not the beginning of tory manager named Fujio about how huge corporations a joke. It’s actually part of a technology tale filled with Masuoka decided typically exploit discord and lawsuits, lots of lawsuits. It all started in he’d reinvent semi- internal innova- 1988 when Fish and Moore created a bizarre proces- conductor memory. tions. As it turned sor called Sh-Boom. The chip was so streamlined it We’ll get to that in a out, Masuoka’s could run faster than the clock on the circuit board minute. First, a bit bosses at Toshiba that drove the rest of the computer. So the two design- (groan) of history is told him to, well, ers found a way to have the processor run its own in order. erase the idea. superfast internal clock while still staying synchro- B e fo r e f l a s h He didn’t, of nized with the rest of the computer. Sh-Boom was m e m o r y c a m e course. In 1984 never a commercial success, and after patenting its along, the only way to store he presented a paper on his innovative parts, Moore and Fish moved on. Fish what then passed for large memory design at the IEEE later sold his patent amounts of data was to use International Electron Devices rights to a Carlsbad, magnetic tapes, floppy disks, Meeting, in San Francisco. Calif.–based firm, and hard disks. Many com- That prompted Intel to begin Patriot Scientific, panies were trying to create development of a type of flash which remained a solid-state alternatives, but memory based on NOR logic profitless speck of the choices, such as EPROM gates. In 1988, the company a company until its (or erasable programmable introduced a 256‑kilobit chip executives had a rev- read-only memory, which that found use in vehicles, elation: In the years required ultraviolet light to computers, and other mass- since Sh-Boom’s erase the data) and EEPROM market items, creating a nice invention, the speed (the extra E stands for “elec- new business for Intel. of processors had by trically,” doing away with That’s all it took for far surpassed that of the UV) couldn’t store much Toshiba to finally decide to motherboards, and data economically. market Masuoka’s invention. so practically every Enter Masuoka-san at His flash chip was based on maker of computers Toshiba. In 1980, he recruited NAND technology, which and consumer elec- four engineers to a semisecret offered greater storage den- tronics wound up project aimed at designing sities but proved trickier to using a solution just like the one Fish and Moore had a memory chip that could manufacture. Success came patented. Ka-ching! Patriot fired a barrage of lawsuits store lots of data and would in 1989, when Toshiba’s first left: C left: against U.S. and Japanese companies. Whether these be affordable. Their strategy NAND flash hit the market.

h companies’ chips depend on the Sh-Boom ideas is a was simple. “We knew the cost And just as Masuoka had pre- u c k k matter of controversy. But since 2006, Patriot and of the chip would keep going dicted, prices kept falling. M oore; rig oore; Moore have reaped over US $125 million in licensing down as long as transistors Digital photography gave fees from Intel, AMD, Sony, Olympus, and others. As shrank in size,” says Masuoka, flash a big boost in the late h for the name Sh-Boom, Moore, now at IntellaSys, in now CTO of Unisantis 1990s, and Toshiba became t: F u Cupertino, Calif., says: “It supposedly derived from Electronics, in Tokyo. one of the biggest players in j io masuoka masuoka io the name of a bar where Fish and I drank bourbon Masuoka’s team came up a multibillion-dollar mar- and scribbled on napkins. There’s little truth in that. with a variation of EEPROM ket. At the same time, though, But I did like the name he suggested.” that featured a Masuoka’s relationship with consisting of a single transis- other executives soured, and tor. At the time, conventional he quit Toshiba. (He later sued EEPROM needed two tran- for a share of the vast profits sistors per cell. It was a seem- and won a cash payment.) ingly small difference that had Now NAND f lash is a a huge impact on cost. key piece of every gadget— the nerve-racking but admittedly enter- In search of a catchy name, ­cellphones, cameras, music taining task of playing games for weeks,” they settled on “flash” because players, and of course, the USB says Ravi Bhatnagar, the chip-set lead of the chip’s ultrafast eras- drives that techies love to wear designer and now a vice president at ing capability. Now, if you’re around their necks. “Mine has Altierre Corp., in San Jose, Calif. The thinking Toshiba rushed the 4 gigabytes,” Masuoka says. o C&T chips enabled manufacturers like Taiwan’s Acer to make cheaper PCs and launch the invasion of the PC clones. Intel With additional reporting by Sally Adee, Erico Guizzo, and Samuel K. Moore bought C&T in 1997. www.spectrum.ieee.org May 2009 • IEEE Spectrum • NA 43

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