25 classic old chips, know more than 5 engineers to prove that you are the best!

Chip design is sometimes just like our life, sometimes small things will slowly accumulate and become a great thing. Design a clever microcircuit and then engrave it on a piece of silicon. A little masterpiece of yours could trigger a technological revolution.

This happened on the Intel 8088 processor. The Mostek MK4096 4Kbit Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) and Texas Instruments' TMS32010 digital signal processor have also revolutionized the technology.

In the half century that integrated circuits dominated, many outstanding microchips were born in incredible people, but only a small part of them became the best among them. Their design proved to be so advanced, so avant-garde, so advanced that we had to create more technical terms to describe them. It can even be said that they bring us the technology to make life simple, without them our life will become tedious. Let's take a look at these 25 microchips. They have shocked the world and changed our lives!

1. Siegniki NE555 Timer (1971)

It was the summer of 1970, and its designer Hans Camenzind could even recall one or two things about Chinese restaurants at the time. In the downtown area of ​​Sunnyvale, Calif., the company has three offices, and Camenzind's office is sandwiched between two offices and is small. At the time, Camenzind was a consultant to a local semiconductor company, Siggenic. Camenzind was not well-off at the time, his annual salary was less than $15,000, and he had a wife and four children at home.

At the time, Camenzind really needed to invent an outstanding thing. Of course he did the same. In fact, this is the most outstanding microchip in history. The 555 is a simple IC that can be used as a timer or oscillator. This microchip became the best-selling product of its kind and soon became widely used in kitchen supplies, toys, spaceships and thousands of other products.

Camenzind recalls: "At the time, the microchip was almost unsuccessful." In the idea of ​​designing the 555, Camenzind was designing a system called a phase-locked loop. After some modifications, the circuit can work like a simple timer. You set the time and it will run for a specific period of time. It sounds very simple, but it is not the case.

First, the engineering department of Siegniki rejected the idea. Because the company was selling some parts at the time, customers could use them as timers. This has already ended the idea, but Camenzind has always insisted on his own ideas. He found Art Fury, marketing manager at Siegnic. Fury appreciates this idea. To this end, Camenzind spent nearly a year testing the prototype of the circuit board and repeatedly drawing circuits on the paper to cut the Rubylith mask. Camenzind said: "It was all handmade, no computer." His final design had 23 transistors, 16 resistors and 2 diodes.

555 entered the market in 1971, when it caused a sensation in the market. The company was acquired by Philips Semiconductors in 1975, now NXP Semiconductors. The 555 sales reached billions. Engineers are still using 555 to design some useful modules and some less useful things, such as the design of the movie "Ranger Ranger" style lights for the car air intake grille.

Without TMC0281, ET may never be able to "call home". This is because TMC0281 is the first single-chip speech synthesizer, and it is also the "heart" of Texas Instruments' Speak & Spell learning toy (we should be said to be "mouth"?). In Steven Spielberg's film, aliens used it to build their own interplanetary transmitters (in the movie, ET also used a hanger, a coffee pot and a circular saw).

TMC0281 uses a technique called linear predictive coding to deliver sound, which sounds like a series of hum, hum and bang. Gene A. Frantz of the four engineers of the year was still at Texas Instruments. He said that this surprising solution is considered "impossible through integrated circuits." The improved microchip was used in Atari arcade games and Chrysler K-cars. In 2001, Texas Instruments sold the speech synthesis chip line to Sensory, which discontinued production in late 2007. If you need to make a long distance or a long distance call, you can spend about $50 on eBay to buy a "speak and fight" toy that is still in good shape to meet your needs.

When a freak of geeks mounted the microchip on a computer and started the computer, the whole universe was shocked. This weirdo is one of Apple's founders, Stephen Woznick, the computer is Apple I, the processor is an 8-bit microprocessor 6502 developed by Mosstek. The processor is also the brain of classic computers such as the Apple II, the Commodore PET, BBC Micro, and gaming systems such as Nintendo and Atari. Chuck Peddle, one of the processor's designers, recalled that they introduced the processor at a trade show in 1975.

He said: "We used chips to fill two glasses. My wife and I sat there to sell these chips." The 6502 microprocessor finally stood out because the 6502 was no faster than its competitors, but It's cheap, each is priced at $25, while Intel's 8080 and Motorola's 6800 sell for about $200. Bill Mensch, who designed the 6502 with Peddle, said the breakthrough was to combine a minimal set of instructions with the production process, which produced 10 times more output than other competing products. The 6502 forced the price of the processor to drop, which contributed to the PC revolution. Some embedded systems are still using these chips today. A bigger interest may be in "Flying a Future", 6502 is the brain of the fallen robot Bender, this information appeared in the 1999 plot.

In the article "The True Image of Bender's Brain," David X. Cohen, film producer and lead author of "Flying a Future," will explain why he chose 6502 as Bender's brain.

As a big state in the United States, Texas has left a lot of deep impressions, such as "ten gallons" hat, fried chicken chops, pepper dr. drink, and TMS32010 digital signal processor, but compared to the aforementioned For a few special products, the TMS32010 digital signal processor may be less famous. Although the TMS32010 developed by Texas Instruments is not the first DSP (the first DSP was the DSP-1 introduced by Western Electric in 1980), it is the fastest one. The TMS32010 can multiply in 200 nanoseconds, and the engineers are excited. In addition, it can execute instructions from fast on-chip ROM and slow off-chip RAM. The products that compete with it only have DSP capabilities. Wanda Gass, a member of the DSP design team, is still at Texas Instruments. He said: "This advantage makes program development for the TMS32010 more flexible, just like program development for microcontrollers and microprocessors." The TMS32010 is priced at $500 each, and in the first year it sold 1,000 units. Sales then began to skyrocket, and DSPs are now widely used in modems, medical equipment, and military systems.

Oh, there is another application for TMS32010, which is used on a cute doll that can sing and talk. TMS32010 is the first in the large DSP family. The future DSP family will continue to expand, which is the wealth of Texas Instruments.

In the early 1990s, the 8-bit microcontroller field was dominated by a Motorola company. Then a small competitor with a humble name was on the scene. This is Microchip Technology. Microchip Technology has developed the PIC 16C84, which integrates a memory called EEPROM. When erasing, the PIC 16C84 microcontroller does not require an ultraviolet eraser like its predecessors. The chip's main designer, Rod Drake, is now a director of Microchip Technology. He said: "Now users can change their code in flight." Even better, the cost of this chip is less than $5, which is only a quarter of the cost of other alternatives. These alternatives are mainly from Motorola. The 16C84 has been used in smart cards, remote controls, and wireless car keys. The 16C84 became the beginning of the microcontroller field, and Microchip Technology Inc. became the electronics industry superstar in the Fortune 500 rankings. The 16C84 has sold 6 billion units, some of which are used in industrial controllers, unmanned aerial vehicles, digital pregnancy testing, chip-controlled pyrotechnics, LED jewelry, and septic monitors called Turd Alert.

Op amps are silicon plates that are similar in design. You are always using some of them. You can use them in almost everything, and they will do some beautiful tasks beautifully. Designers use them to make audio and video preamps, voltage comparators, precision correctors, and many other systems that are part of everyday electronics. In 1963, 26-year-old engineer Robert Widlar designed the first monolithic op amp IC, the μA702, at Fairchild Semiconductor. At that time, each unit was priced at $300. Subsequently, Widlar designed the μA709 through improvements, and the cost was reduced to $70, which made the product a huge commercial success. The story is here, and Widlar, whose career is in full swing, is asking for a promotion.

After the request was not met, Widlar resigned. National Semiconductor, if it was awarded a treasure, quickly hired Widlar. At National Semiconductor, Widlar helped establish a similar IC design department. In 1967, Widlar developed a better operational amplifier, the LM101, for National Semiconductor. Although the management of Fairchild has become overwhelmed by the sudden competition, the newly added David Fullagar has carefully studied the LM101 in the company's R&D lab. Soon, Fullagar found that although the design of the LM101 is very clever, there are still many shortcomings. To avoid specific frequency distortion, engineers had to connect an external capacitor to the chip. In addition, due to fluctuations in the quality of the semiconductor, the input stage of the IC, the so-called front end, makes some chips very sensitive to noise. He said: "The front end looks like a temporary make-up." Fullagar set out to start his own design. He expanded the semiconductor manufacturing process limitations at the time and integrated a 30-pound capacitor into the chip. How to improve the front end now? The solution is very simple, adding a pair of extra transistors. “At the time, I didn’t know how to solve this problem. I drove to Lake Tahoe.” The extra circuitry made the amplification smoother, from chip to chip.

Fullagar found Gordon Moore, director of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor, with his own design. Moore then sent the design to the company's commercial division. The new chip μA741 is the standard for operational amplifiers. The IC and similar products developed by Fairchild's competitors have sold millions of units. You can buy thousands of 741 chips today at a price of $300 per unit.

Critics have been ridiculing the ICL8038's limited performance and irregular operation. This orthodox, right angle, triangular, sawtooth and pulse waveform generators are somewhat unreliable. But engineers quickly found a way to use the chip reliably, and then the 8038 achieved great success, eventually selling 80 million units and finding its way of application in countless applications. Such as the famous Moog music synthesizer, as well as the stealth circuit liners in the 1980s beat the telephone company's "blue box" and so on. The 8038 is so hot that Intersil has published a book called "All Aspects of ICL8038 You Always Want to Know."

There is such a question: "Why can the connection pins 7 to 8 achieve the best temperature performance?" Intersil gave up 8038 in 2002. But enthusiasts are still collecting ICL8038 to make their own generators and TaylorMade keyboards. * Currently, Intersil's public relations department and the company's last contact with ICL8038 engineers are not aware of the exact ICL8038 data. do you know?

In the 1960s, Gordon Bell was known at the Digital Equipment Corporation for launching the PDP series of minicomputers. His findings are little known, but one of the most significant technological inventions: the universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter, or the UART. Does Bell need to put some circuits to teletypewriters with PDPs? 1 connection, which requires the conversion of parallel signals into continuous signals and vice versa. To achieve this goal, he used about 50 discrete components.

As a small company that makes calculator chips, Western Digital invented a single-chip UART. Al Phillips, founder of Western Digital, recalled that his vice president of engineering showed him the design with a Rubylith masking film that was already machined. Phillips said: "I saw this design for a minute and recognized an exposed circuit. The vice president was a little excited." Western Digital introduced the WD1402A around 1971, and other versions were quickly pushed out. UARTs are currently widely used in modems, PC peripherals, and other devices.

In the early 1980s, Acorn Computer was a small company with an important product. The company is located in Cambridge, England. In the end, BBC Micro Desktop Computer acquired Acorn Computer Inc. for $1.5 million. Acorn engineers decided to develop their own 32-bit microprocessor. Engineers call it Acorn RISC Machine or ARM. They know that ARM's design is not easy. In fact, half of them predict that they will encounter insurmountable design obstacles and will eventually have to give up the entire project. ARM's co-designer Steve Furber is currently a professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester.

He said: "The team size is so small that every design decision is very simple, otherwise we will never be able to complete it." The final simplicity brings unprecedented differences. ARM is very small, low power, and easy to program. Sophie Wilson, who is responsible for the design instruction set, still remembers the first time they tested the chip on a computer. She said: "When we typed 'PRINT PI' at the prompt, it immediately gave the correct answer. We opened a few bottles of champagne to celebrate." In 1990, Acorn stripped the ARM division. The ARM architecture has become the mainstream 32-bit embedded processor. More than 10 billion ARM processors are widely used on a variety of devices, including Newton, one of Apple's best-known failures, and Apple's most promising product, the iPhone.

When the Kodak DCS 100 digital camera was introduced in 1991, the price was as high as {{13000:0}} dollars, and it required an external data storage device weighing 5 kilograms. What do users think of this design? This is not a wonderful moment for Kodak. However, camera electronics at the time was the body of the Nikon F3, including a piece of hardware: a chip with a thumb nail size that captures images at a resolution of 1.3 megapixels, which is 5 x 7 inches Size is rinsed.

The chip's main designer, Eric Stevens, is still at Kodak. Stevens said: "At the time, 1 million pixels was a dreamy number." This chip, a true two-phase charge-coupled device, became the basis for future CCD sensors, and its emergence helped trigger the digital photography revolution. By the way, what is the first photo taken by KAF-1300? Stevens replied: "Well, we pointed the sensor at the wall of the lab. "

On one side of the board is a human brain weighing 1.5 kilograms. On the other side is a 480 chess chip. In 1997, humans finally lost to computers. At that time, IBM's chess computer Deep Blue defeated the then world champion Gary Kasparov. Each chip in dark blue is arranged in a special way by 1.5 million transistors, as are some RAM and ROM. These chips can calculate 20 billion moves per second. In the game, people came to help the dark blue decision, Kasparov called them "not like computers." Deep blue designer, now Feng-hsiung Hsu, who works for Microsoft, recalls: "They have shown a lot of psychological pressure. "

High power is accompanied by huge heat sinks, short battery life, and crazy power consumption. Therefore, Transmeta's goal is to design a low-power processor that dwarfs Intel and AMD processors. Their plan is that the software can translate x86 instructions into Crusoe's own machine code, and these higher levels of parallelism will save time and power. Crusoe is known as the greatest invention since the IC, at least for the time being. The title used on the cover of the May 2000 issue of IEEE Spectrum magazine is "Engineering Wizards Developed Gold Processors". David Ditzel, the co-founder of Transmeta, currently at Intel, said: "Crusoe and his successor Efficeon proved that dynamic binary decoding is commercially viable." He said, unfortunately, before the emergence of the low-power computer market These chips have been around for a few years. In the end, although Transmeta failed to deliver on their promises, they forced Intel and AMD to reduce power consumption.

On June 18, 1999, Larry Hornbeck made a date with his wife, Laura. They watched the movie "Star Wars Prequel 1: The Phantom Crisis" at a movie theater in Burbank, California. Hornbeck is not a fan of Jedi. The reason is that there is a real projector there. This projector uses a chip developed by Hornbeck at Texas Instruments - a digital micromirror chip. The chip uses tens of thousands of fine mirrors that are hinged together to emit light through the projector lens. Hornbeck said: "This screening is the first digital display of a major movie." In thousands of theaters, film projectors are now using the digital light processing technology developed by Texas Instruments or called DLP. This technology is also used on rear projection TVs and office projectors. Hornbeck said: "Gentlemen, this effect was created by micromirrors. "

Is there a chip that can bring Intel to the Fortune 500 list? Intel will say yes, that is 8088. This is a 16-bit CPU, which IBM used as its own CPU for its unique PC line, and then 8088 dominated the desktop market.

In the vortex of fate, this processor based on the famous x86 architecture does not have "86". The 8088 was only slightly modified based on Intel's first 16-bit CPU 8086. After Intel engineer Stephen Morse introduced it, the 8088 was called the "8086 castrated version." Since the main innovation of the new chip is not in the name, its innovation lies in the 8088 processing data in 16-bit words, but it uses It is the 8-bit external data general route.

Intel management has been keeping the 8088 project strictly confidential when the 8086 design is nearing completion. Peter A. Stoll, the key engineer for the 8086 project, also participated in some of the design work for the 8088. He said: "The management doesn't even want to delay 8086 one day. They are afraid to tell us that they have already modified the 8088 in their minds, which will affect the completion time of the 8086. The one-day task forces us to solve the microcode that took three days to solve. Vulnerabilities " .

After the first 8086 was launched, after Intel shipped the 8086 exhibits and documents to a design department in Israel, two engineers, Rafi Retter and Dany Star, decided to change the processor to an 8-bit bus.

Intel's Robert Noyce and Ted Hoff said in an article written for IEEE Micro magazine in 1981 that the change proved to be Intel's most successful decision. In comparison, the 8088 with 29 000 transistors is required to reduce the transistor data, which is cheaper than the 8086. It provides faster processing speed and is fully compatible with 8-bit hardware. It can be smoothly converted to 16-bit. processor.

The first PC to use the 8088 is IBM's 5150. The PC was priced at $3,000 at the time. Today, all PCs with CPUs in the world can regard 8088 as their ancestors. This is not bad for a castrated chip.

Before the iPod, there was the Diamond Rio PMP300. The PMP300 was launched in 1998 and was immediately sold as soon as it was pushed. But it's withering faster than Milli Vanilli. However, one of the compelling features of this player is the use of the MAS3507 MP3 decoder chip. This is a RISC-based digital signal processor with an instruction set that optimizes audio compression and decompression.

The MAS3507 MP3 decoder chip, developed by Micro-Open Semiconductor, allows Rio to load several songs into its own flash memory. It seems a bit funny today, but it was enough to compete with portable CD players. Oh, is it interesting? Rio and its successors paved the way for the iPod. Now you can play thousands of songs, and even you can put all of Milli Vanilli's photo albums and music videos into your pocket.

Mostek is not the first company to introduce DRAM, and Intel has also launched it. But Mostek's 4 kbit DRAM chip comes with an important innovation called circuit design for address multiplexing. This technology was designed by Moztec co-founder Bob Proebsting. Basically, with multiple addressing signals, the chip can access the rows and columns of memory using the same pins. This allows the chip to eliminate the need for more pins after the memory density increases, which can reduce costs. There will be minor compatibility issues here. The 4096 uses 16 pins, while the memory made by Texas Instruments, Intel and Motorola is 22 pins. In the history of DRAM, what is the biggest confrontation after this?

Mostek put its future on the chip, and its managers began lobbying customers, partners, the news media and their employees. Fred K. Beckhusen, who was just hired at the time, was scheduled to test 4096 devices. Beckhusen recalled that at the time Proebsting and CEO LJ Sevin came to his night shift at about 2am to discuss with him. Beckhusen said: "They were boldly predicting that within six months, no one will ever hear or pay attention to 22-pin DRAM." They are correct. 4096 and its successors have gradually become the mainstream of DRAM.

In the early 1980s, chip designers have been trying to harness the power of every transistor in the circuit. However, Ross Freeman has a rather radical idea about this. He designed a chip full of transistors that were loosely organized into logic cells. These logical units can be configured in turn or reconfigured by software. Sometimes, many transistors are not used. However, Freeman believes that Moore's Law will eventually make transistors really cheap.

He is bet on it. In order to sell chips called field-programmable gate arrays, which are FPGAs, Freeman co-founded Xilinx with others. The company's first product, the XC2064, was introduced in 1985 when employees were assigned a task: they had to manually draw an example circuit using the XC2064 logic unit, just like Xilinx's customers. Bill Carter, former CTO of Xilinx, recalled the task assigned by CEO Bernie Vonderschmitt: "He had some minor difficulties in doing this homework." Carter is happy to help his boss. He said: "We are all there, holding colored pencils on paper to do Bernie's assignment." Today, FPGAs sold by Xilinx and other companies are used in many of the products on this list.

Federico Faggin clearly knows the energy and money spent on selling microprocessors. During Intel, he contributed to the original 4004 and 8080 designs of the two classic products. When he co-founded Ziglo with former Intel colleague Ralph Ungermann, they decided to start designing a simpler chip: a single-chip microcontroller.

Faggin and Ungermann rented an office in Los Altos, California, and began drafting a business plan and began to seek capital. Faggin recalled that they were having lunch at a nearby Safeway supermarket, and lunch was "camen cheese and biscuits."

Engineers quickly discovered that the microprocessor market is already full of well-designed chips. Even if their chips are better than others, they can only get a modest profit, and they can only continue to eat cheese and biscuits. Ziglo had to look at the higher layers of the food chain, so the Z80 microprocessor project was born.

Their goal is to do better than the 8080 and be fully compatible with the 8080 software to attract customers to give up Intel. In a few months, Faggin, Ungermann and former Intel engineer Masatoshi Shima worked 80 hours a week at the desk to draw the Z80's circuitry. Faggin soon discovered that while designing the microchip, the smaller and more beautiful, but it will hurt the eyes.

He said: "At the end, I had to wear glasses. I became myopia."

The entire design team worked from 1975 to 1976. In March of 1976, they completed a prototype chip. The Z80 is a product of the same era as the 6502 of the Morseco company. Like the 6502, their success is not just about the design, but also the cheap price (about $25). Bringing products to market has brought them a lot of confidence. Finally, Faggin, who had a stomach ulcer, said: "That is an exciting time."

The sale was finally successful. The Z80 is used in thousands of products, including Osborne I (the originator of portable computers) and Radio Shack TRS? 80 and MSX home computers. In addition, the Z80 is also available on printers, fax photocopiers, modems and satellites. Zieglo also used the Z80 in some embedded systems. In a basic configuration, the price of the Z80 today is $5.73, which is even cheaper than a cheese and biscuit lunch.

Microprocessor designers can seek to increase the complexity of CPU instructions to get more calculations in each calculation cycle. The team at the University of California at Berkeley has always been a pioneer in anti-tradition, and their formulation is just the opposite. They have proposed a simplified instruction set. They believe that processing instructions too fast will result in fewer behaviors in each cycle. The Berkeley team led by David Patterson proposed RISC, a reduced instruction set computer.

As a purely conceptual study, RISC sounds very appealing. But is it feasible? Sun Microsystems bet on this. In 1984, a small team of Sun engineers began developing a 32-bit RISC processor (or scalable processing architecture) called SPARC. Sun intends to use this chip on a new workstation product line. Patterson, a consultant at the SPARC project, recalls: "One day, CEO Scott McNealy reappeared in SPARC's R&D lab. He said SPARC can raise the company's annual revenue of $500 million to billions of dollars a year."

At that time, R&D encountered a lot of pressure, and many outsiders expressed doubts about Sun's success. To make matters worse, Sun's marketing team has a terrible perception: SPARC is getting better and worse. To this end, the R&D team had to swear not to disclose information to other people or even inside Sun personnel, lest it leaked news to competitor MIPS Technologies. At the time, MIPS Technologies was also exploring the RISC concept.

Robert Garner, who led the current IBM researcher at SPARC Design, recalled that the first minimum version of SPARC consisted of 20,000 array processors, even without multiply/divide instructions. 10 million instructions per second, which is three times faster than the complex instruction set computer (CISC) processor at the time.

Sun decided to use SPARC on high-margin workstations and upcoming servers in the future. The first SPARC-based product was introduced in 1987 as a Sun-4 series workstation. This product has captured the market and helped the company break through the $1 billion revenue threshold. It's all as predicted by McNealy.

Some of the hi-fi enthusiasts insist that vacuum tube-based amplifiers produce the best sound and will continue to do so. So when some audio associations announced that solid-state Class D amplifiers designed by Silicon Valley-based company Tripath Technology were able to deliver sounds that were as mellow and vibrating as vacuum tube amplifiers, it was awesome. Tripath is designed to drive amplifiers using a 50 megahertz sampling system. According to Tripath, the TA2020's performance is superior and the price is lower than any comparable solid-state amplifier. In order to showcase this product at the fair, Tripath founder Adya Tripathi said: "We have specially broadcast a romantic episode in the Titanic." Compared with most D-class amplifiers, 2020 is very effective. A compact appearance can be used since no heat sink is required. Tripath's low-end 15-watt version of the TA2020 is priced at $3 and can be used in external speakers and mini-headphones.

Remember the scene of throwing a squeaky 56.6k modem into the trash after the DSL? Those of you and two-thirds of the world's broadband users who use DSL should thank Amati Communications. In the 1990s, a DSL modulation method called discrete multi-tone, or DMT, appeared. Its basic principle is to think of a telephone line as a multi-channel, through the inverted Robin Hood strategy to improve transmission.

John M. Cioffi, co-founder of Amati and now an engineering professor at Stanford University, said: "Bit was robbed by the poorest channel and assigned to the richest channel." DMT beat many solutions to become the global standard for DSL Among them, including the telecommunications giant AT&T's program. In the mid-1990s, Amati's DSL chipset (one analog, two numbers) sold in general. But by the year 2000, sales had soared to millions. Earlier in 2000, the annual sales of chipsets exceeded 100 million. In 1997, Texas Instruments acquired Amati.

Because Motorola is at a disadvantage in 16-bit microprocessors, they decided to catch up on the type. The mixed 16-bit/32-bit MC68000 has 68 000 transistors, which is twice the number of Intel 8086. The MC68000 also has an internal 32-bit register, but the price of this product is somewhat higher due to the 32-bit bus. So the 68000 uses a 24-bit address and a 16-bit data line. The 68000 may be the last important processor designed on paper with a pencil. Nick Tredennick, the logic unit designer at 68000, said: "I have reduced the size of the flow chart, execution unit resources, decoder and control logic copies in turn throughout the project members." The copy is very small and difficult to read. To this end, Tredennick's bad-eyed colleague found a way to see the copy. Tredennick recalled: "One day I entered my office and found a copy of a credit card-sized flowchart placed on my desk." Early Macintosh computers, Amiga and Atari ST used 68000. A large amount of sales come from embedded applications in laser printers, arcade game consoles and industrial controllers. IBM uses the 68000 as a chip for its PC product line. Because the 68000 still has some shortcomings, IBM is also using Intel's 8088 chip. As one observer said, the prosperity of Motorola has made the Wintel system formed by the joint monopoly between Microsoft and Intel into the Winola system.

In 1984, when IBM introduced the PC of the 80286 AT line, IBM has clearly become the winner of the desktop computer, and IBM intends to continue to maintain its dominance. However, these plans for the Big Blue were defeated by a small company called Chips & Technologies in San Jose, Calif. C&T研发了五个芯片，这些芯片能够复制AT主板的功能，其可以使用大约100个芯片。为了确定这些芯片组能够与IBM PC兼容，C&T工程师们发现只需要做一件事就行了。芯片的主要设计者Ravi Bhatnagar目前是圣何塞Altierre公司副总裁。他称：“我们没有为此伤脑筋，我们只是打了数周的游戏通过娱乐任务进行测试。”C&T的芯片使得诸如台湾宏基等制造商可以生产出更便宜的PC机，并向IBM发起PC兼容机的入侵行动。英特尔在1997年收购了C&T。

两个芯片设计者走到了一个酒吧。他们是Russell H. Fish III 和Chuck H. Moore，这个酒吧就是Sh-Boom。哦，这不是一个玩笑。事实上，这个技术传奇充满了不和和诉讼，大量的诉讼。在1988年，当Fish和Moore设计出了一款名为Sh-Boom的处理器后这一切就开始了。这款芯片设计的非常先进，它甚至比电路板上驱动电脑其它部分的计时器还要快。为此， 两名设计者找到了让处理器运行自己的超快内部计时器的办法，而与此同时，内部计时器仍然与与电脑的其它部分同步。Sh-Boom从来都没有获得过商业成功。在为他们的设计申请了专利后，Moore和Fish继续从事研发。

当东芝工厂管理员藤尾增冈决定自己重新发明半导体存储器时，闪存的发明传奇也就此打开了序幕。这个我们马上就会有印象。

在闪存出现之前，我们用于存储大量的数据不得不利用磁带、软盘和硬盘。许多公司在努力设计出一种固态代替方案。但是诸如EPROM（需要紫外线擦除器来擦除数据）和EEPROM等方案并不能有效的存储大量数据。

在1980年，藤尾增冈招聘了四名工程师启动了一个半秘密的项目以研发一个存储芯片，实现存储大量数据，并且让用户可以买得起。他们的战备非常简单。目前担任东京Unisantis Electronics首席技术官的藤尾增冈称：“我们知道只要晶体管在尺寸上降下了了，那么芯片的成本也将会下降。”

藤尾增冈的团队推出了一款EEPROM的改良产品，记忆单元由一单个晶体管组成。在当时，常规的EEPROM每个记忆单元需要两个晶体管。这个小小的不同对价格带来了巨大的影响。

为了起一个便于记住的名字，他们将这个芯片称为“flash”，这个名字也是因为芯片的超快擦除能力。现在，你会认为东芝会迅速将这一发明投入生产，并看着这一发明为公司带来的滚滚财富，这里你可能不清楚大公司的内部研发情况。当这一发现成功后，藤尾增冈的老板告诉他，好了，忘掉这个发明吧。

当然，藤尾增冈不会忘掉这个发明。在1984年，藤尾增冈带着他的存储市场图纸参加了在旧金山召开的IEEE国际电子设备大会。这提醒英特尔开始研发基于“非或”逻辑门的闪存。在1988年，英特尔推出了一款256K芯片，这款芯片能够用于汽车、电脑和其他设备之中。这为英特尔带来了一个崭新的业务。

这促使东芝决定将藤尾增冈的发明进行营销。藤尾增冈的闪存芯片基于NAND技术，这一技术可以提供更高容量的存储，并且被证明更容易制造。在1989年，最终取得了成功，当时东芝的首款NAND闪存投入市场。事实正如藤尾增冈所预测的那样，价格出现了下降。

在上世纪九十年代末期，数码摄影推出了闪存的应用。东芝也因此成为了这一价值达数十亿美元市场中的最大参与者。与此同时，藤尾增冈与东芝中的其他管理人员的关系恶化，最终，藤尾增冈辞职离开了东芝。

现在NAND闪存已经成为了手机、照相机和音乐播放器中重要的设备。