Foonlies

[Chuck Guzis]

On 01/31/2018 04:26 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:

> Then again, DEC Western Research Lab in the mid 1980s did an
> interesting project to do a full custom single ECL chip
> implementation of a MIPS (or Alpha?) CPU, intended to run at 1 GHz.
> The CAD system they built for this was quite interesting, as were
> bits of key technology like a heat pipe based chip cooling setup,
> possibly the first such device.  It wasn't finished (the ECL fab
> shops kept going out of business faster than the CAD team could tweak
> the design rules in the tools) but some neat stuff came out of it, in
> internal reports only unfortunately.
Still have a bunch of ECL 10K logic--I've never been very interested in
using it for anything.

I think that AES built their own minicomputer using ECL back in the
1970s, but I don't recall ever seeing much about its release.

More surprising than the advance of Schottky TTL on ECL was the
startling speedup of CMOS.   Back in the 70s, 4000-series CMOS was among
the slowest logic around.  By the mid 1980s, we were building
supercomputers using CMOS.

--Chuck