X-Nico

6 unusual facts about Integrated Circuit


CcTalk

ccTalk protocol stacks have been implemented on a range of devices from tiny Microchip microcontrollers with 512 bytes of ROM to powerful ARM7 32-bit processors.

IBM Rivina

The idea was to use aggressive circuit design techniques, a carefully crafted floorplan and microarchitecture while keeping a short six stage pipeline.

Inmos microprocessor factory

The technical requirements were that it would house controlled conditions for the production of electronic microchips, a service area for various offices and a staff canteen, all under one roof.

Media Auxiliary Memory

Media (or Medium) Auxiliary Memory (MAM) refers to a chip embedded into a digital media device (usually a tape cartridge) that stores a small amount of data or metadata that a computer can read without having to read the actual tape.

Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive

For instance, a circuit board is composed of a bare PCB, ICs, resistors, capacitors, switches, etc.

Sixty Million Dollar Man

That evening, in a fit of despair, Sing attempts suicide but is stopped when Chang delivers a new microchip he's been working on.


ACCESS.bus

The higher layers, namely the signaling and protocol issues, are already defined to be the same as Philips' Inter-Integrated Circuit (I²C) bus.

Donald Pederson

Donald O. Pederson (September 30, 1925 – December 25, 2004) was an American professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the designers of SPICE, the canonical integrated circuit simulator.

General Instrument SP0256

GI-SP0256 refers to a family of closely related NMOS LSI chips manufactured by General Instrument in the early 1980s, able to model the human vocal tract by a software programmable digital filter, creating a digital output converted into an analog signal through an external low pass filter.

Instrumentation amplifier

Instrumentation amplifiers can be built with individual op-amps and precision resistors, but are also available in integrated circuit form from several manufacturers (including Texas Instruments, National Semiconductor, Analog Devices, Linear Technology and Maxim Integrated Products).

Karnataka Quiz Association

The quiz was originally named after Nobel laureate Jack Kilby who designed the first Integrated Circuit while working for Texas Instruments but is now known by the name of the company.

Mark Papermaster

In April 2008, Apple bought P.A. Semi, a microchip design company, with the intent of using the company's chips on Apple's iPods and iPhones.

Qimonda

At its height in 2007, Qimonda employed approximately 13,500 personnel worldwide, from whom 1,800 were employed in R&D with access to four 300 mm manufacturing sites and operating six major R&D facilities, and included a chip packaging complex in Vila do Conde, Portugal, and its lead R&D center in Dresden, Germany, in total covering three continents.

Random-access memory

As suggested above, smaller amounts of RAM (mostly SRAM) are also integrated in the CPU and other ICs on the motherboard, as well as in hard-drives, CD-ROMs, and several other parts of the computer system.

Scientific calculator

The HP-9100 series was built entirely from discrete transistor logic with no integrated circuits, and was one of the first uses of the CORDIC algorithm for trigonometric computation in a personal computing device, as well as the first calculator based on Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) entry.

Static random-access memory

The power consumption of SRAM varies widely depending on how frequently it is accessed; it can be as power-hungry as dynamic RAM, when used at high frequencies, and some ICs can consume many watts at full bandwidth.

Thermally conductive pad

In computing and electronics, thermal pads (also called thermally conductive pad or thermal interface pad) are a pre-formed square or rectangle of solid material (often paraffin wax or silicone based) commonly found on the underside of heatsinks to aid the conduction of heat away from the component being cooled (such as a CPU or another chip) and into the heatsink (usually made from aluminium or copper).

Tyranny of numbers

Although successful in this goal, it was Robert Noyce's silicon version and the associated fabrication techniques that make the integrated circuit (IC) truly practical.


see also

Caswell, Northamptonshire

The GaAs Field effect transistor and the GaAs monolithic ic were invented and developed at Caswell, but what is probably less well known is that scientists on the site were working on silicon integrated circuit(ic) technology almost 18 months before Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working ic at Texas Instruments in Dallas.

CICS

In 1980, IBM executives failed to heed Ben Riggins' strong suggestions that IBM should provide their own EBCDIC-based operating system and integrated-circuit microprocessor chip for use in the IBM Personal Computer as a CICS intelligent terminal (instead of the incompatible Intel chip, and immature ASCII-based Microsoft 1980 DOS).

Common Access Card

The integrated circuit chip (ICC) contains information about the owner, including the PIN and one or more PKI digital certificates.

Contactless

Proximity card, a contactless integrated circuit device used for security access or payment systems