Microchips That Shook the World 185
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 Link, The 25 in a list (Score:5, Informative)
PRINT ARTICLE (instead of the 5 separate pages):
http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/8747 [ieee.org]
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 )
Re:All of them great (Score:1, Informative)
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....
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:All of them great (Score:5, Informative)
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 ;-)
Re:386? (Score:3, Informative)
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...
Re:Print Link, The 25 in a list (Score:1, Informative)
PRINT ARTICLE (instead of the 5 separate pages):
http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/8747 [ieee.org]
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 )
What about the IBM Cell Processor (2005). Bringing peta-flops to Folding@Home certain qualifies as an amazing contribution, even if the PS3 itself hasn't ruled the console market.
Re:All of them great (Score:2, Informative)
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...
Re:8088 - Gakk! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:8088 - Gakk! (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:All of them great (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:A plug for Hans Camendzind's book (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.designinganalogchips.com/ [designinganalogchips.com]
There's the link!
Re:Print Link, The 25 in a list (Score:3, Informative)
Also, just listing the "winners" doesn't do justice to the article.
On the Internet, we have what are called "hyperlinks". They're typically colored differently from other text and underlined; when your mouse cursor passes over them, it will generally change. If, while your cursor is over the hyperlink, you press the left mouse button (called "clicking"), your browser will load a different page, to which the hyperlink points.
A good example of this can be found in your parent's post, near the top. That poster included a colon after the first line of his or her post; this is a grammatical convention which denotes that the statement is more fully described by that which follows the colon. Try clicking on that hyperlink now, then use your browser's "back" button to return to this page. Wow! You found the complete text of the article on one page!
I'm'a go out on a limb and suggest that the complete article does, in fact, do justice to the article. I don't think abstracting the list detracts from it, either.
And today we've both learned lessons on the magic of the Internet and the magic of reading and the magic of me being a condescending bastard.
Re:6502 - C64 (Score:3, Informative)
...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?
Re:8088 - Gakk! (Score:1, Informative)
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