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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 )
Even as a modern EE/robotics guy I use some of those parts today (555 timers in particular). 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 discrete transistors and passive components.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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If the 6502 was good enough for Bender, why did they bother with anything else?
Protected mode was just the x86 architecture welcoming itself back to the reality most other processors already inhabited.
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.
Yeah, the 741 is there (though I reckon it should be #2, or even #1 - you know you can make a 555-equivalent suitable for most purposes with a couple of 741's and some clever circuit design, right? ;-).
But yeah, the lack of 7400 series (the original TTL versions, not that 74xxC crap ;-) is odd. Definately should be up there ~ #3 or higher. That stuff was the building blocks of computers before dedicated CPUs.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Interestingly enough, when Bill Mensch and company designed the 6501 (and later lawsuit modified 6502), they purposely made it very easy to expand it for future use. Although the chip was original designed for use in embedded solutions, several reports suggest that Bill Mensch, as well as fellow designer Chuck Peddle, saw the possibilities of the personal computer. This was around the time that the Altair 8800 was just released.
Bill Mensch attempted to push Commodore for features that might be useful for a personal computer. However, Commodore management rebuffed him. Supposedly frustrated that Commodore management was as short sighted as the Motorola management that he had fled from just a few years earlier, Bill Mensch went on to start his own company designing successors to the 6502.
Over at Western Design Center, Mensch and his sister designed the WDC 65C02, a bugfixed and enhanced version of the MOS 6502, that found its way into the Apple IIc and "enhanced" IIe. They also designed the WDC 65816, an extremely feature enhanced version of the 65C02 that included 16-bit index registers, 24-bit addressing, movable stack and zero page locations, and a host of new ops that allowed for jump tables and position independent code (useful with multitasking OSes and shared libraries).
Just imagine if Commodore had the 65816 in 1980 and released a 16-bit successor to the PET that could handle up to 16MB without the weirdness of bank swapping or segmentation. It would have been very popular with programmers. Smoking the "what if" crack pipe even more, imagine if they ported TRIPOS to the 65816. :)
Too bad they probably would have ruined it by bundling it with a chicklet keyboard.
FTFA:
Among the many great chips that have emerged from fabs during the half-century reign of the integrated circuit...Intel's 8088
Wrong. The 8088 was a technical nightmare with a crappy architecture . It just got lucky. IBM's justifiable preference was Motorola's infinitely superior 68000. Unfortunately, the 68000 was 9 months to a year away form production and the 8088 was in production 'now'. IBM felt that it had do it 'now' or miss the market window, so they (reluctantly) went with the 8088. A combination of perfect timing, luck, great marketing form IBM and Intel then and superb marketing strategy from Intel (the best selling sow's ear ever) sealed its place in history as a marketing success, but by no means a technical marvel.
It was nothing special at all and it definitely didn't shake the world. It didn't lead to a bunch of devices using it and it didn't lead to a new path for computing
The presence of this chip on here makes no sense to me.
Oh wait, I just got to where they talk about a Micronas MP3 decoding chip. So I guess this list is a little hit or miss.
I could hardly agree more with the Chips & Technologies AT chipset being on this list. It may have been more important to the success of the 8088 than the 8088 itself was. All of a sudden making a PC clone was easy, and inevitably it became the standard, so standard that now even Macs use the PC architecture.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
What's amazing to me is how the op-amps have been improved. I checked out of analog chips for about 25 years, then had occasion to use them. LM258 -- runs on 3 to 32 volts, rail-to-rail inputs and outputs, uses a whole milliamp to run.
Or the LMC6462 -- 3 to 15 volts, rail-to-rail in and out, 50 microamps supply, and an input resistance of 10 TeraOhms.
Seriously! How many of us learned assembly with a 68k? How many are in service today. It's like the Mini/Beetle/Model T of the chip world: cheap, simple and with a practically cosmopolitan distribution.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Too awkward to compose a URL at the moment, but if you're a pro or more-advanced hobbyist you should google the 555 chip's designer, Hans Camendzind . He released a nifty book on basic analog IC design that never got the attention it deserved IMHO. I believe it's downloadable as a PDF from his site.
The 8088 is a twisted, flawed architecture.
In true QWERTY fashion, it got a lock on the market by solving an immediate problem: the need to get beyond a 16-bit address space in a single-chip microprocessor. We are hamstrung by its limitations to this day.
See
Limitations of the IBM PC Architecture
or
The Curse of Segments
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/rants/pc.html
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?
I wrote an operating system and hardware drivers for a Z80 based embedded system in 1986. It was and still is a great processor as long as you only need 8 bits.
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.
Yep, I learned my first Assembly Language on the 6502 back in 1983 or so, and had just started writing cool, fast game and utility software on the Atari 800 around 1985 using the very nice Atari Macro Assembler, when *boom* the era of Atari was over.
So I moved to the Amiga and programmed that lovely machine in 680x0 assembler using the slick "DevPac" programming environment by HiSoft. Bad geek that I was, I never learned Intuition or any of the Amiga system calls, but went straight to the hardware for the titles I worked on, namely "Dino Wars" and "Bill 'n' Ted's Excellent Adventure" (apologies for both). Then *boom* the Amiga was dead.
After a long hiatus from programming I got a PowerMac. On the Mac the first software I bought was the fringe macro assembler "Fantasm" by Lightsoft, thinking I'd be a Mac Assembler guru, but alas, Apple had moved from 680x0 to the PowerPC by that time, and only insane maniacs program that chip directly in Assembler.
So finally, in 1995 I finally learned C, and a few years later C++.
Of course nowadays I learn a new programming language every year and an entirely new framework or API every couple of months.
-- thinkyhead software and media
The low-power, low-voltage op amps are impressive -- I'll see your LMC6462 and raise you an LT6003: 1.6 to 16 volts, 1uA supply, though the input resistance is slightly worse at 10GOhm (differential) to 2TOhm (common mode).
In some ways more impressive, imho, are the high speed precision op amps. Take a look at the LT1468, for example -- 90MHz, 75uV offset, and settles to 150uV in under a microsecond.
On the other hand, most of my breadboards still begin life with a uA741 or LM324 -- I'd much rather let the smoke out of a cheap op amp than an expensive one. Once the smoke stays in, I'll swap it for the one that will actually act as a precision part.
I'd rather find out about interesting and unique chips, rather than ones that "shook the world".
Like the Propellar, with its interesting interrupt handling, and non-stamped design.
Damnit, I clicked Submit rather than Continue Editing!
This isn't so much impressive hardware, as impressive software:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5885351342753379583&q=8088
FMV on an 8088!
Okay, I admit, the quality/resolution isn't that good, but it's still fascinating. :P
Actually, one could make the argument that we do not have enough segments. Were there more segments available within an application, you could have theoretically eliminated some sorts of attacks caused by buffer overruns.
Looking back at the time, going from segments to flat was a godsend. However, going from segments to selectors would have been probably better from a security standpoint, although computers would be slower.
This is my sig.
The PowerPC should really be there. Not so much for its use in the Mac, but because it's so widespread in the embedded world. In fact, I think it's the most used embedded architecture by far. You might not think of your car or washing machine as "world-changing", at least not for their electronics, but actually the reliability of modern devices is largely down to this. The PPC must be one of the most common "invisible" bits of technology that most people actually use.
...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!
Nah, you no longer need to be extremely inovative to produce awesome chips. These are the days of cheap transistors on nm manufacturing scales. We have gotten to the point where a clever way of doing something is obsolete, because its faster and cheaper to throw more transistors at our designs and resuse all our existing "cleverness".
There is something about limited resources that encourages amazing innovation. When we have "enough", why innovate?
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
"But the 6502? A lucky near-clone of the 6800 that was popular not because it was particularly innovative, but because it was cheap. The 8088? The bastard stepchild of the 8086 which lucked out in getting picked over the 68000 in the IBM PC."
The article is entitled, "25 Microchips That Shook the World". The criteria is chips which were influential in their impact. That doesn't necessarily mean they had clean or clever designs, or were particularly innovative, or even "good" by any objective measure. It means that they mattered in the course of industry.
You dismiss the 6502 because it's only innovation was low cost. That still counts, and arguably more than most other distinctions. The Ford Model T, the Apple II, the IBM-PC clones, even books printed on the Gutenberg printing press -- their big difference was that they were cheap enough to bring their products to a much wider market. Legions of people who couldn't afford technology before suddenly could .
The 8088's big feature was being in the right place at the right time, no doubt about it. But it still went on to propel the x86 in to being the dominant architecture for general-purpose computers today. Wintel uses it. Apple Mac uses it. Most free *nix boxes use it. Sun uses it in many of their products. Even supercomputers use it. Quite simply, x86 is everywhere. That's "world shaking" by any definition I can think of.
There's a lesson here, too. Many times engineers and geeks favor technically sophisticated or clean designs, and reject designs which don't meet those criteria, and loose big time when their theoretically "better" design loose out to a cheaper or more practical alternative. Call it "worst is better" if you like, but putting all your money on a horse that loses the race isn't good, either.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.