Chips equivalent to 2M transistors

Press, 30 November 1982, Page 26

Chips equivalent to 2M transistors

With the arrival of the •"superchips” (complete com- . puter “brains” squeezed on to minature chips of silicon only slightly thicker than this paper) computers are shrinking even more rapidly than in the past. Powerful computers that once required looms of their own now can fit into a package about the size of a child’s lunch box.

Five of the most remarkable of the. superchips have been put to work in the HP 9,000, just introduced by Hewlett-Packard. These quarter-inch-square chips handle all of the main factions of the new computer. The largest of the HewlettPackard superchips contains electronic circuits equivalent to 600,000 • transistors. Together, .Hewlett-Packard’s

five superchips have the equivalent of more than two million transistors — more than four times the number of parts in a Jumbo jet. The chips are able to hold all of these components because of a Hewlett-Packard advance in very large-scale integrated-circuit technology, squeezing the electronic circuits on the chips down to only one micron, or 40 millionths of an inch apart. In a circuit of this density, a pinhead would cover 25,000 of the chips’ transistors.

With the circuits so close together information gets transferred from one circuit to another 18 million times every second.

The extremely small size of the chips made it possible for Hewlett-Packard to create what it believes to be

the world's most powerful desk-top size computer. Using the superchips compresses the power of a large, expensive scientific and engineering majnframe computer into the compact HP 9000 desktop workstation. While it is the size of a personal computer, the new HP machine is 100 times more powerful than personal computers used in homes and small businesses, says Hewlett-Packard.

Floating-point routines are included in the microcode of the HP 9000 processor. The 9000 wil perform a singleprecision floating point multiply in 1.8 microseconds and a double-precision multiply in 10.4 microseconds. “The HP 9000 NMOS technology is approximately eight times denser than anything presently offered by anyone else,” says Mr Alan Thompson, New Zealand sales manager for HewlettPackard.

At one micron, the integ-rated-circuit line width in the new chips compares with three microns for the motorola 68,000 microprocessor. The memory bus band-width is 36 megabytes per second compared with 3.3 megabytes per second on the 68,000.

Reliability in the HP 9000 is increased by the use of error correction bits in each memory word. 1

The HP 9000 was six years in development, and at the peak of the effort, more than 250 engineers were on the project.