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| The Historical Development Of Microprocessors (Brief Overview) |
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| Monday, 25 September 2006 | |
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Page 2 of 4 Historical background. The invention of the transistor won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 
1947.The inventors
were
three engineers working with Bell Labs. Their names : Shockley,
Battain and
Bardeen.
(Electrical conductivity characteristics of semi conductor materials
such as the
silicon
chip -derived from silica-sand-was used in this primary electronic
invention that
transformed
the world in later years.)Shockley left Bell Labs and set up a company called Shockley Labs in CA.This was in 1950. Some of his colleagues joined with him. These also included two guys named Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. They soon found working with Shockley was a big problem as he was suspicious, dictatorial, volatile and moody.Noyce and Moore left Shockley in 1957. Under the leadership of Robert Noyce, some engineers joined together and formed a company called Fairchild Semiconductors. Formation of Intel. 
Being
unhappy at Fairchild, Noyce and Moore wanted to leave. Bob Noyce
typed a draft of ideas on a single sheet of paper on what their new
company would do. That convinced San Francisco venture capitalist Art
Rock who supported Noyce's and Moore's new venture. Rock raised $2.5
million dollars in just 2 days.
The company called Integrated Electronics in Santa Clara in 1969 was thus set up.Tedd Hoff joined as the twelfth employee. This was the beginning of Intel. The first few microprocessors. A Japanese calculator firm called Busicom gave an order to Integrated Electronics to produce calculator chips. Busicom wanted a 4 bit processor with 12 chips. Separate chips were specified for key board scanning, display control, printer control etc etc. Intel had no manpower to do the job. However they came up with a solution. Ted Hoff suggested that Intel could make one chip to do the work of twelve. Intel and Busicom agreed and funded the new programmable, general-purpose logic chip. Federico Faggin headed the team with Ted Hoff and Stan Mazor.  Nine months
later, a new chip was born. Called the 4004, at 1/8th inch wide by
1/6th inch long and consisting of 2,300 MOS (metal oxide
semiconductor) transistors,
the baby chip had so much processing power, that it took every one by
surprise. This was in 1971.With shrewd business intelligence, Intel bought back the design and marketing rights to the 4004 from Busicom for $60,000. The next year Busicom went bankrupt, they had never thought of producing any products using the 4004. They had committed the "biggest marketing mistake of the century" by signing away their rights to Intel. Intel chartered out a good marketing strategy, which encouraged the development of applications for their 4004 chip. This led to its substantial use in the electronic industry within a short time. The 4004 thus became world's first universal microprocessor. In the late 1960s, many engineers had evaluated the feasibility of a "computer on a chip", but it was considered that integrated circuit technology may not support such a chip. Intel's Ted Hoff thought differently; he recognized that there is every possibility to make s single-chip based CPU using the new silicon-gated MOS technology. The Intel team generated architecture with about 2,300 transistors in a small area of 3 by 4 millimetres. With its 4-bit CPU, command register, decoder, decoding control, control monitoring of machine commands and interim register, the 4004 was a brilliant invention. 
Soon
enough, in 1974, a more powerful microprocessor, called the 8008, was
fabricated as a single chip. It was Faggin who initially worked on
the 8008. The first few samples produced had serious problems such as
leakage of the electrical charge from the memory circuits. The 8008
underwent a complete redesign and was released later. Soon followed
by the Intel 8080. The power supply for these chips was provided with
a 5V unit.
Faggin, the brain behind the 8008, the basic unit of the modern day microprocessors of Intel, later on left them and established a company called Zilog. It was at this time, that Motorola, a big semi conductor firm,  released
their own first microprocessor. It was called the 6800.It used an 8
bit processor and had the same capacity of Intel's 8080. |