Technology :-PIONEERS OF THE MICROPROCESSOR WE SALUTE YOU ALL.

Intel 4004 Microprocessor

Undoubtedly the world became a much better place due to amazing developments at a Startup Company on the West Coast of America from 1969 - 1971.

The effects of this project are still felt in the World Today.

There can be no doubt that we owe a debt of gratitude to Ted Hoff, Frederico Faggin and Stanley Mazor all former employees of the Intel Corporation. With Special thanks to Masatoshi Shima formerly of Busicom.

They embarked on the MCS-4 Project in April 1969.

Frederico Faggin

Frederico Faggin, originally from Italy and who previously had worked at Olivetti was a fresh faced 28 year old who had transferred over recently to work for Intel in Palo Alto. He had been brought in as a Lead Designer to oversee the Design Components of the important Project.

Ted Hoff or Intel employee number 12 was Lead Architect on the MCS-4 Project. He had become the applications research manager at the then memory semiconductor chip making small enterprise, as of 1969. Ted Hoff is commonly referred to as the 'Rock Star of Intel' - a worthy accolade indeed.

The project was only really embarked upon - as a revenue making exercise to keep the company generating revenue until the Memory Chip SemiConductor Market Developed.

Busicom were a prominent Japanese Calculator Company and were seeking a partner company to develop Large Scale Integration Circuits specifically for their Calculators. They had also approached Mostek in New England but ultimately Intel was selected to manufacture the chips.

The customer representative engineer who worked closely with Hoff and Faggin was Masatoshi Shima. He lead a team of enginners from Busicom. Shima actually stayed longer at the Intel manufacturing facility than planned and finally returned to Japan in October 1970 when the project was near completion.

Masatoshi Shima

 

Ted Hoff had a critical role in the whole saga by pursuing a new revolutionary chip design from an architectural standpoint. The actual practical instruction set was worked on by Stanley Mazor.

Hoff was indeed a visionary and Busicom were impressed by this far simpler yet unconventrional design. He and his team spent weeks preparing the block diagrams of the cpu basic architecture and the 4 chip set with associated instructions.


Faggin worked 80 hour weeks to keep the project 'on track' and devised the silicon wafer design.


The Intel 4004 would eventually be born with Great Fanfare and would be commonly known as the ' first computer on a chip'. The working parts were assembled by February 1971.


The 4004 was composed of 2250 transistors and amazingly could perform up to 2000 additions per second.


Calculations were in 4 bit chunks.


The chip had 2048 bit metal mask programmable ROM with a 4 bit programmable input/output port.


It was also composed of self refreshing 320 bit dynamic RAM with 4 bit output.


The revolutionary design of just 4 chips also included one programmable chip , one cpu chip, one ram chip for processing data and one shift register chip for the i/o port.

Haven't processors come a long way since those pioneer days!

The 4004 was made specifically for embedded control units.

Busicom had developed the firmware for the Calculator and chip in February 1971.

March 1971 and both companies were very impressed with the awesome working prototype.

In July 1971 Calculator production started.

Finally Intel announced on November 15th 1971 they would manufacture the 4004.

Swiftly the 8008 processor was released in April 1972 after further development and Intel have never looked back since.

Those exciting developments from 1969 - 1971 have made our lives much easier in 2011.