3 ms·
This was just before (1977) computers were used to design chips (Mead & Conway 1980). So you see some irregular hand drawn parts here. I did a fair amount of ha
by peter303 6y ago
This was just before (1977) computers were used to design chips (Mead & Conway 1980). So you see some irregular hand drawn parts here. I did a fair amount of hand tape circuit design myself in the 1970s. Pre-computer designs were prone to current bottlenecks and dead end wire. A computer could greatly error.
By the mid 1980s computer designed CPUs were a work of art with their regular symmetric lattices. And shimmered with rainbow colors as circuit lines shrunk to wavelengths of visible light.
- jecel 6y agoThough Mead & Conway students used CAD from the start, there is nothing in their method that would keep it from also being used in hand taped designs. Current attempts to design CPUs with open source tools are not so nice since they tend to be one big standard cell blob. Adding some PLA and RAM generators would improve this.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoI used that effect in the early nineties to make earrings out of them. In this form factor, delidded. [1] http://www.cpushack.com/chippics/Intel/8028x/IntelC80286-6.html http://www.cpushack.com/chippics/Intel/8028x/IntelC80286-6.h... Was difficult to reliably attach the clip to them, had a dental-lab technician friend waste several diamond drill bits on them. Asked several jewelers, of course they wanted insane prices while saying they were unsure because they don't know how to work with that stuff. So I resorted to superglue, with the effect that when moving the head too fast it fell down to the ground, made a very high-pitched PING and was cracked cleanly in half along its diagonal axis. Didn't matter since I had quite a few of them :-)