That Shook the World
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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 Intel’s 8088 microprocessor 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 KWISE FROM LEFT: HANSTOP CAMENZIND; “ 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- CORPORATION. ILM nological revolution. It happened with that we think deserve the best spot on nologists about their favorite chips. Ever the Intel 8088 microprocessor. And the the mantelpiece of the house that Jack wonder which IC has a special place Mostek MK4096 4-kilobit DRAM. And Kilby and Robert Noyce built. Some in the hearts of both Gordon Moore, A the Texas Instruments 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 Signetics Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing H TS 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; have emerged from fabs during the half- the Fairchild 741 operational amplifier, We also want to know what you think. A century reign of the integrated circuit, 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 Microchip Technology’s PIC micro- list sent you into paroxysms of rage? 2009 © AND 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 T WENTIET flash memory, created whole new mar- http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may09/ K OBAL COLLE 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 C 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 computer,” 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 Steve Wozniak, the near a Chinese restaurant. When the 555 hit the market computer was the Apple I, 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 Philips 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 computers 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 Nintendo 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 LEFT: HANSTOP CAMENZIND; “ a circular saw.) while Intel’s 8080 and Motorola’s 6800 The TMC0281 conveyed voice were both fetching nearly $200. F OX OX using a technique called linear pre- The breakthrough, says Bill Mensch, F ILM CORPORATION. CORPORATION. ILM 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 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 TS F UTUR R of the four engineers who designed launch the personal computer revolu- ESERVED; the toy and is still at TI. Variants of tion. Some embedded systems still use A Texas Instruments TMC0281 MA” MA” the chip were used in Atari arcade the chip. More interesting perhaps, the TM U Speech Synthesizer (1978) NIVERSAL/ AND © 2009 2009 © AND 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 T WENTIET K “phone home.” That’s because the continued it in late 2007. But if you [See “The Truth About Bender’s OBAL COLLE 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 C 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.