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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 )
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?
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.