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The Intel 4004 had 2250 transistors, and it was designed to work in concert with support chips, unlike a modern MCU. A quick search doesn't turn up any known mo
by RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
The Intel 4004 had 2250 transistors, and it was designed to work in concert with support chips, unlike a modern MCU. A quick search doesn't turn up any known models with fewer. 1500 for an MCU might be possible, but it'd be a tight squeeze. Registers and multiplexers chew through transistors rather quickly.
- kragen 5y agoThe 4004 had to go fast enough to run a calculator at 0.75 MHz though. A modern chip typically runs at 100 MHz and can run at 4 GHz. If you could fab it in indium phosphide (which wouldn't be CMOS!) you could maybe run it at 400 GHz and use an optical fiber as a delay-line memory, 1 bit per millimeter. This sort of thing might enable you to use less transistors than a 4004. I got down about that low with a bit-serial design whose only arithmetic instruction was a subtract, but I haven't simulated it at even the RTL level, just done a gate-level design on paper and a couple of software instruction-level sims.