Other
“The IBM 1401 team at the Computer History Museum accumulates a lot of mystery components from donations and other sources. While going through a box, we came across the unusual circuit board below. At first, it looked like an IBM …
“Apple’s first product was the Apple-1 computer, introduced in 1976. This early microcomputer used an unusual type of storage for its display: shift register memory. Instead of storing data in RAM (random-access memory), it was stored in a 1024-position …
“If you’ve played around with electronic circuits, you probably know the 555 timer integrated circuit,1 said to be the world’s best-selling integrated circuit with billions sold. Designed by analog IC wizard Hans Camenzind2, the 555 has been …
“The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer for 1980s pop music. It used two custom digital chips to generate sounds with FM synthesis. In this blog post, I examine the log-sine ROM that digitally produces sine waves …
“The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer was released in 1983 and became “one of the most important advances in the history of modern popular music”1. It defined the sound of 1980s pop music, used by bands from A-ha and Michael …
“I recently did a PC power supply teardown so I figured it would be interesting to go deeper and see what happens inside the power supply’s control IC. The die photo below shows the UC3842 chip, which was very …
“The Motorola MC14500B1 is a 1-bit processor introduced in 1976. While a 1-bit processor might seem almost useless,2 it was marketed as an Industrial Control Unit for applications that made simple decisions based on Boolean logic, for example, air …
“I recently saw an interesting die photo of an unknown chip on Twitter, so I did some analysis of it. Looking at the circuitry inside, the chip appears to be four comparators, probably in the ECL (Emitter Coupled Logic) family …
“Recently I realised that, as part of his 8086 reverse-engineering series, Ken Shirriff had posted online a high resolution photograph of the 8086 die with the metal layer removed. This was something I have been looking for for some time …
“Integrated circuits are often built from standard-cell logic, constructed from standardized building blocks such as NAND gates. Since I’ve been looking at a chip that uses standard-cell logic, I figured it was a good opportunity to examine standard-cell logic …