When the chubby-faced geek stuck that chip on the computer and booted it up, the univer skipped a beat. The geek was Steve Wozniak, the computer was the Apple I, and the chip was the 6502, an 8-bit microprocessor developed by MOS Technology. The chip went on to become the main brains of ridiculously minal computers like the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the BBC Micro, not to mention game sys-tems like the Nintendo and Atari. Chuck Peddle, one of the chip’s creators, recalls when they introduced the 6502 at a trade show in 1975. “We had two glass jars filled with chips,” he says, “and I had my wife sit there lling them.” Hordes showed up. The reason: The 6502 wasn’t just faster than its competitors—it was also way cheaper, lling for US $25 while Intel’s 8080 and Motorola’s 6800 were both fetching nearly $200.
The breakthrough, says Bill Mensch, who created the 6502 with Peddle, was a minimal instruction t combined with a fabrication process that “yielded 10 times as many good chips as the competition.” The 6502 almost single-handedly forced the price of processors to drop, helping launch the personal computer revolu-tion. Some embedded systems still u the chip. More interesting perhaps, the 6502 is the electronic brain of Bender, the depraved robot in “Futurama,” as revealed in a 1999 episode.
[See “The Truth About Bender’s Brain,” in this issue, where David X. Cohen, the executive producer
and head writer for “Futurama,” explains how the choice of the 6502 came about.]
It Was the summer of 1970, and chip designer Hans Camenzind could tell you a thing or two about Chine restaurants: His small office was squeezed between two of them in downtown Sunnyvale, Calif. Camenzind was working as a consultant to Signetics, a local mi-conductor firm. The economy was tanking. He was making less than US $15 000 a year and had a wife and four children at home. He really needed to invent something good.And so he did. One of the great-est chips of all time, in fact. The 555 was a simple IC that could function as a timer or an oscillator. It would become a best ller in analog mi-conductors, winding up in kitchen appliances, toys, spacecraft, and a few thousand other things.
“And it almost didn’t get made,” recalls Camenzind, who at 75 is still designing chips, albeit nowhere near a Chine restaurant.
The idea for the 555 came to him when he was working on a kind of system called a pha-locked loop. With some modifications, the circuit could work as a simple timer: You’d trigger it and it would run for a cer-tain period. Simple as it may sound, there was nothing like that around.
At first, Signetics’s engineering department rejected the idea. The company was already lling com-
ponents that customers could u to make timers. That could have been the end of it. But Camenzind insisted. He went to Art Fury, Signetics mar-keting manager. Fury liked it.
Camenzind spent nearly a year testing breadboard prototypes, drawing the circuit components on paper, and cutting sheets of Rubylith—a masking film. “It was all done by hand, no computer,” he says. His final design had 23 tran-sistors, 16 resistors, and 2 diodes.When the 555 hit the market in 1971, it was a nsation. In 1975 Signetics was absorbed by Philips Semiconductors, now NXP, which says that many billions have been sold. Engineers still u the 555 to create uful electronic modules—as well as less uful things like “Knight Rider”–style lights for car grilles.
Texas Instruments TMC0281 Speech Synthesizer (1978)
If It Weren’t for the TMC0281, E.T. would’ve never been able to “phone home.” That’s becau the TMC0281, the first single-chip speech synthesizer, was the heart (or should we say the mouth?) of Texas Instruments’ Speak & Spell
learning toy. In the Steven Spielberg movie, the flat-headed alien us it to build his interplanetary commu-nicator. (For the record, E.T. also us a coat hanger, a coffee can, and a circular saw.)
The TMC0281 conveyed voice using a technique called linear pre-dictive coding; the sound came out as a combination of buzzing, hiss-ing, and popping. It was a surpris-ing solution for something deemed “impossible to do in an integrated circuit,” says Gene A. Frantz, one of the four engineers who designed the toy and is still at TI. Variants of the chip were ud in Atari arcade games and Chrysler’s K-cars. In 2001, TI sold its speech-synthesis chip line to Sensory, which dis-continued it in late 2007. But if you ever need to place a long, very-long-
d istanc
e phone call, you can find Speak & Spell units in excellent con-dition on eBay for about US $50.
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Signetics NE555 Timer (1971)
MOS Technology 6502
Microprocessor (1975)
CloCkwi from top left: Hans Camenzind; “futurama” tm and © 2009 twentietH Century fox film Corporation. all rigHts rerved; universal/tHe kobal ColleCtion
四小天鹅芭蕾舞
Fairchild Semiconductor μA741 Op-Amp (1968)
OperatIOnal amplIfIers are the sliced bread of ana-log design. You can always u some, and you can slap them together with almost anything and get something satisfying. Designers u them to make audio and video preamplifiers, voltage comparators, precision rectifiers, and many other sys-tems that are part of everyday electronics.
In 1963, a 26-year-old engineer named Robert Widlar designed the first monolithic op-amp IC, the μA702, at Fairchild Semiconductor. It sold for US $300 a pop. Widlar followed up with an improved design, the μA709, cutting the cost to $70 and making the chip a huge commercial success. The story goes that the freewheeling Widlar asked for a rai. When he didn’t get it, he quit. National Semiconductor was
way into countless applications—like the famed Moog music synthesizers and the “blue boxes” that “phreakers” ud to * N either Intersil’s PR department nor the company’s last engineer working with the part knows the preci introduction date. Do you?
back In the early 1990s, the huge 8-bit micro-controller univer 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-mable read-only memory. It didn’t need UV light to be erad, as did its progenitor, EPROM. “Now urs could change their code on the fly,” says Rod Drake, the chip’s lead designer and now a direc-tor at Microchip. Even better, the chip cost less than US $5, or a quarter the cost of exist-ing alternatives, most of them from, yes, Motorola. The 16C84 found u in smart cards,新生儿打嗝怎么办怎么止嗝
remote controls, and wireless car keys. It was the beginning of a line of microcontrollers that became electronics super-stars among Fortune 500 com-panies and weekend hobbyists alike. Some 6 billion have been sold, ud in things like indus-trial controllers, unmanned aerial vehicles, digital preg-nancy tests, chip-controlled fireworks, LED jewelry, and a ptic-tank monitor named the Turd Alert.
Texas Instruments TMS32010 Digital Signal Processor (1983)
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Microchip Technology PIC 16C84 Microcontroller (1993)
the bIg state Of texas has given us many great things, including the 10-gallon hat, chicken-fried steak, Dr Pepper, and perhaps less prominently, the TMS32010 digital signal processor chip. Created by Texas Instruments, the TMS32010 wasn’t the first 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 nanoconds, a feat that made engineers all tingly. What’s more, it could execute instructions from both on-chip ROM and off-chip RAM, whereas competing chips had only canned DSP functions.
“That made program devel-opment [for the TMS32010] flexible, just like with microcontrollers and microprocessors,” says Wanda Gass, a member of the DSP design team, who is still at TI. At US $500 apiece, the chip sold about 1000 units the first year. Sales eventually ramped up, and the DSP became part of modems, medical devices, and military systems. Oh, and another application: Worlds of Wonder’s Julie, a Chucky-style creepy doll that could sing and talk (“Are we making too much noi?”). The chip was the first in a large DSP family that made—and continues to make—TI’s fortune.
C l o C k w i s e f r o m t o p l e f t : J a n e t m . b a k e r ; m i C r o C H i p t e C H n o l o g y ; i n t e r s i l
Fullagar embarked on his own design. He stretched the
c ompetitors—have sol
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e hundreds o
f millions. Now, for $300—the price ta
优美文章精选g of that primordial 702 op-amp—you can get about a thousand of today’s 741 chips.
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Western Digital
WD1402A UART (1971)
gOrdOn bell is famous for launch-ing the PDP ries of minicomputers at Digital Equipment Corp. in the 1960s. But he also invented a lesr known but no less significant piece of technology: the universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter, or UART. Bell needed some circuitry to connect a Teletype to a PDP-1, a task that required converting paral-lel signals into rial signals and vice versa. His implementation ud some 50 discrete components. Western Digital, a small company making calculator chips, offered to create a single-chip UART. Western Digital founder Al Phillips still remembers when his vice president of engineering showed him the Rubylith sheets with the design, ready for fabri-cation. “I looked at it for a minute and spotted an open circuit,” Phillips says. “The VP got hysterical.” Western Digital introduced the WD1402A around 1971, and other versions soon followed. Now UARTs are widely ud in modems, PC peripherals, and other equipment.
凉拌青椒
Acorn Computers ARM1 Processor (1985)
In the early 1980s, Acorn Computers was a small company with a big product. The firm, bad in Cambridge, England, had sold over 1.5 million BBC Micro desk-top computers. It was now time to design a new model, and Acorn engineers decided to create their own 32-bit microprocessor. They called it the Acorn RISC Machine, or ARM. The engineers knew it wouldn’t be easy; in fact, they half expected they’d encounter an insurmountable design hurdle and have to scrap the whole proj-ect. “T
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he team was so small that every design decision had to favor simplicity—or we’d never finish it!” says codesigner Steve Furber, now a computer engineering professor at the University of Manchester. In the end, the simplicity made all the dif-ference. The ARM was small, low power, and easy to program. Sophie Wilson, who designed the instruc-
梦见鲜花tion t, still remembers when they first tested the chip on a computer. “We did ‘PRINT PI’ at the prompt, and it gave the right answer,” she says. “We cracked open the bottles of champagne.” In 1990, Acorn spun off its ARM division, and the ARM architecture went on to become the dominant 32-bit embedded pro-cessor. More than 10 billion ARM cores have been ud in all sorts of gadgetry, including one of Apple’s most humiliating flops, the Newton handheld, and one of its most glit-tering success, the iPhone.
Kodak KAF-1300 Image Sensor (1986)
launched In 1991, the Kodak DCS 100 digital camera cost as much as US $13 000 and required a 5-kilogram external data storage unit that urs had to carry on a shoulder strap. The sight of a person lugging the contraption? Not a Kodak moment. Still, the camera’s electronics—houd inside a Nikon F3 body—included one impressive piece of hardware: a thumbnail-size chip that
could capture images at a resolution of 1.3 megapixels, enough for sharp 5-by-7-inch prints. “At the time, 1 megapixel was a magic number,” says Eric Stevens, the chip’s lead designer, who still works for Kodak. The chip—a true two-pha charge-coupled device—became the basis for future CCD nsors, helping to kick-start the digital photography revo-lution. What, by the way, was the very first photo made with the KAF-1300? “Uh,” says Stevens, “we just pointed the nsor at the wall of the laboratory.”
from top: aCorn Computers; david fullagar; kodak
Lee Felnstein毛笔字书法
computer pioneer
The humble, ubiquitous, and quite inexpensive signetics 555 timer had a big impact on my career, when I found mylf using it to craft var-ious pul-quencing cir-cuits, baud-rate oscillators, and ramp generators for my
earliest consulting clients. With a latch triggered by two comparators, a high-current-drive output and a parate open-collector output for discharging capacitors, the 555 offered a wide range of us wit
h the addition of a few analog components. It suggested that it could pro-vide more than it delivered at times, which helped me refine my understanding of the limits of a chip and the need to consider its operation There were lots of great chips, but one that will going to be made obsolete by the new technology. Even today, when I look at my digital watch and e 11:03, I cannot help but remember this key product in Intel’s history.
Jeff Hawkins
founder of Palm and Numenta
My personal favorite—a chip that opened my eyes to what was possible—was the Intel 2716 eprOm , vintage late 1970s. The 2716 was nonvola-tile, held 2 kilobytes of mem-ory, and, unlike many other chips, ud a single 5-volt power supply, so it could be ud as storage in a small and practical package. Of cour, its big disadvantage was that you needed a UV light to era it. But with a little imagination you could e that one day it could all be done electrically. In some n the 2716 is the great-was a special one. I built a speaking computer with it. I also wrote a multitasker in asmbler. That chip was the workhor of learning back during my wait—mind. I also like ZettaCore’s first
1-megabyte molecular memory chip, D-Wave’s solid-state 128-qubit quantum computer processor, the Pentium (I’ve got an 8-inch wafer signed by Andy Grove in my office), the Canon EOS 5D 12.8-megapixel CMOS nsor, and the iTV 5-bit asynchronous pro-cessor running Forth and a custom OS—whew!
analog accel-com-mercial chip to significantly integrate MEMS and logic circuitry. Commercialized in the early 1990s, it revolution-ized the automotive air-bag
industry—and saved lives! Today this type of accel-erometer is ud in a variety of applications, includ-ing the Nintendo Wii and the Apple iPhone. Other types of MEMS chips are more and more prent in a broad variety of applications.
One of my favorite great microchips is the 1-kilobit dram bipolar); and four, opened up at least another 40 years 38 NA • iEEE SpEctrum • mAy 2009
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My favorite chip contained only a single transistor, although shottky field-effect made from GaAs (later called the MESFET and advanced structures, the HEMT). I designed it over
Thanksgiving break in 1965. The very high mobility of the III-IV materials, together with the abnce of minority-carrier storage effects, made the devices far superior for a microwave power-output stage. Despite my efforts to interest American companies, the Japane were the first to develop the devices. They have made microwave communications in sat-ellites, cellphones, and many other systems possible
