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Microchips That Shook the World
wjousts writes "IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article on '25 Microchips That Shook the World,' including such classics as the Signetics NE555 Timer, MOS Technology 6502 Microprocessor (Apple II, Commodore PET and the brain of Bender) and the Intel 8088 Microprocessor. Quoting: 'Among the many great chips that have emerged from fabs during the half-century reign of the integrated circuit, a small group stands out. Their designs proved so cutting-edge, so out of the box, so ahead of their time, that we are left groping for more technology clichés to describe them. Suffice it to say that they gave us the technology that made our brief, otherwise tedious existence in this universe worth living.'"
PRINT ARTICLE (instead of the 5 separate pages):
http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/8747
The 25:
1 - Signetics NE555 Timer (1971)
2 - Texas Instruments TMC0281 Speech Synthesizer (1978)
3 - MOS Technology 6502 Microprocessor (1975)
4 - Texas Instruments TMS32010 Digital Signal Processor (1983)
5 - Microchip Technology PIC 16C84 Microcontroller (1993)
6 - Fairchild Semiconductor A741 Op-Amp (1968)
7 - Intersil ICL8038 Waveform Generator (circa 1983*)
8 - Western Digital WD1402A UART (1971)
9 - Acorn Computers ARM1 Processor (1985)
10 - Kodak KAF-1300 Image Sensor (1986)
11 - IBM Deep Blue 2 Chess Chip (1997)
12 - Transmeta Corp. Crusoe Processor (2000)
13 - Texas Instruments Digital Micromirror Device (1987)
14 - Intel 8088 Microprocessor (1979)
15 - Micronas Semiconductor MAS3507 MP3 Decoder (1997)
16 - Mostek MK4096 4-Kilobit DRAM (1973)
17 - Xilinx XC2064 FPGA (1985)
18 - Zilog Z80 Microprocessor (1976)
19 - Sun Microsystems SPARC Processor (1987)
20 - Tripath Technology TA2020 AudioAmplifier (1998)
21 - Amati Communications Overture ADSL Chip Set (1994)
22 - Motorola MC68000 Microprocessor (1979)
23 - Chips & Technologies AT Chip Set (1985)
24 - Computer Cowboys Sh-Boom Processor (1988)
25 - Toshiba NAND Flash Memory (1989)
( mod me up so some karmawhore will find themselves FAIL'd )
I can't imagine the pain you'd have to go to to do some of the things they were used for in their heyday with 555 timers...
There, fixed that for you...
Really though, an ATtiny AVR will replace the 555 with a lot more flexibility, fewer passives and better accuracy...
Cost wise, about the same....
The 555 does have a wider voltage range however...
Long live the AVR....
Agree totally about the 555 but what? No 741 (Op Amp) or 7400 (or any other TTL?) ? Those were the staples of most electronic projects as kits or in magazines etc.
I know reading the FA is frowned upon on slashdot, but if you did, you could find the 741 as number 6.
As an old fart, I wonder why you'd rather use a microcontroller with all the attendant pickyness over I/O and supply voltage stability and noise and costing > $1 in bulk, over a 555 that'll work in fairly noisy conditions from 5~15v and costs a few cents in bulk.
Horses for courses; just try getting your microcontroller to do something like flash an LED in a car without all the extra supply regulation and filtering. A 555 will do it with 6 additional components, including the LED, for less than $1 ;-)
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
I think you mean "No 286? Protected mode FTW".
The 286 had protected mode; you just couldn't return to real mode (which is where everything ran in those days) without the nasty hardware hack IBM developed for the AT. The big advantage of the 386 over the 286 was that you could return to real mode from protected mode without resetting the CPU via the keyboard controller...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
The PIC does it with three external components -- a regulator and a capacitor for power, and a resistor to help drive the LED. If you run at lower supply voltages you can omit the resistor and use the output impedance of the PIC instead, provided you don't care about tweaking the power consumption. Lower parts count and less board area is cheaper, and the PIC is only marginally more expensive than the 555.
And not only is the PIC cheaper, it can do a better job for most circuits. It will operate a more accurate long-period timer without precision components, and do it at sub-microamp power consumption.
At the extreme end, I can make a PIC blink an LED only when it's dark out, using only a CR2032 coin cell, a PIC, and LED. Let's see you get a 555 to do anything useful with two external components, including the battery.
Of course, I say all that, but I prefer to build my circuits with op amps instead of PICs, and I debug them with a Tek 561A. Heck, in the right context a medium speed op amp or three has more compute power than a PIC...
What rock have you been living under? The linked rant/article is from 1992! Contrary to what it says, the limitations of the 8088 architecture *were* overcome by the 386, but that article was written before DOS extenders allowing protected-mode applications became common, never mind Windows adding protected-mode support. The Windows world has had a flat address space for many years now, and the segmented aspects of x86 are only supported for non-performance-critical legacy code.
We've moved past those limitations. Yes, they still exist in the modern Core-class Intel CPUs (and the AMD equivalents). However, as soon as you boot into Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux, Mac OS X, or just about any other OS on the market today, you're put into 386 protected mode. This includes support for a 32 bit flat memory addressing model, which just happens to be the addressing model used by these operating systems.
Long mode (in x86-64) extends that further, into a 64 bit flat addressing model.
So while segments were a bad design choice, looking back with the benefit of hindsight, it is not the case that it's hamstringing us today.
That rant was written in 1992. 17 years ago. Newsflash: technology has moved on since then, and the x86 flaws are just a speck on the side of the instruction set decoder nowadays.
For as groundbreaking that the ARM processor series, it was beat to the punch by DARPA. Not only did they help give us the Internet, they also helped with the evolution of chips that power your PDAs and smart phones that use the Internet.
Now for a trip back in time... supposedly during the late 1970s, processor design was starting to hit the limits of manual design. These were still the days of designing a microprocessor on paper. The military, a huge consumer of microchips at the time, decided to sponsor research into the creation of standardized processes for microprocessor design. The result was DARPA's VLSI Project. Standford, UNC/Chapel Hill, Berkeley and others were involved.
Numerous products and organizations came out of the VLSI Project. The BSD fork of AT&T's System-V saw major use and evolution. Networked CAD systems matured, specifically using the Stanford University Network (SUN) workstation, which was commercialized by Sun Microsystems.
Most relevant to the article, though, was the advancement of the "RISC" design. During the 1970s, researchers noted that highly orthogonal processors (where every type of operation, such as ADD, SUB, SHIFT, XOR, etc..., can be used with any kind of memory operator, such as direct, indirect, indexed, etc...) were somewhat wasteful. The vast majority of operations were rarely used. If you restricted those operations to register-only ops, you could really simplify the processor.
RISC architectures are less memory efficient than CISC architectures, something that was important in the 1970s, a time when dinosaurs roamed and 4KB Altairs roamed the world. They are also more tedious to program using assembly languages, also an issue during the 1970s when higher-level language compilers were rather unoptimized. However, by the time that the VLSI Project came around, these limitations were going away.
Since RISC processors are so much easier to design than CISC processors, researchers used their groovy new tools to design one. So in 1982, the DARPA RISC-1 was born, which had less than half the number of transistors as the Motorola 68000. It also ran circles around the 68000. A year later, the RISC-II was released. It was three times as fast as its predecessor.
The RISC design was also a huge advancement for researchers over at Standford. John Hennessy over there was trying to design a new processor that exploited the concept of pipelining. The problem, however, is that CISC instructions have variable (and often long) execution time. This can cause the pipeline to stall since the processor runs dry on data to execute. RISC design solves that problem because most of the operations, with exception of memory load/store ops, are short and quick. Hennessy borrowed these "new" concepts and came up with the MIPS architecture, one of the first popular RISC designs.
Not much later, Acorn Computer, looking to replace the MOS 6502 processor but dissatisfied with the Motorola 68000, National Semiconductor 32016 and others, went looking for a new chip in 1983. They traveled to the States and visited Western Design Center. Seeing how "simple" it was to design a processor, they brainstormed up the concept of the ARM1.
The ARM probably would never have been designed without the advances that came out of the VLSI Project. The ARM2, the first production unit, only contained some 30K transistors. The DARPA RISC-I was 44K while the RISC-II was reduced to 40K. The 68000 was a whopping 70K transistors.
The PIC requires some infrastructure, though: compiler/assembler, programmer. The 555 requires no external programming.
That said, it's amazing what you can do with a dirt-cheap microcontroller these days.
http://www.designinganalogchips.com/
There's the link!
...which was basically just a 6502 with an extra I/O port. FWIW, most people think of the Atari 2600 as using the 6502, when really it used a 6507. All that was was the same die with fewer address lines pinned out.
Can we stop splitting hairs now?
Program Intellivision!
I feel compelled to point out the fact that your QWERTY "example" is an urban legend:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/221/was-the-qwerty-keyboard-purposely-designed-to-slow-typists