[cctalk] Re: 80386 - 1985

No, DEC did not buy MIPS. It bought MIPS chips. And it did develop an very odd in-house MIPS architecture chip as an R&D exercise, called BIPS, a 1 GHz MIPS chip as a single ECL VLSI chip. I don't remember if it actually happened; ECL fabs were disappearing at the time. The CAD machinery for it was fascinating because it allowed for a full-custom design that would adjust to different fab rules. And a bunch of interesting work was done for the physical design, such as a chip package with a heat pipe, and research into the current carrying capacity of gold bond wires (which is amazingly high). I have a few of the internal reports still saved away; I've never seen a public document that discusses it. Some memory says that it needed over 100 watts of power, which at the time was way beyond what anyone else had done. I'd have to dig to find when this was done; perhaps 1992 or so, definitely at least a year before I left DEC in 1994. I made a suggestion for an unusual die attach scheme when I saw one talk about this, and about a year later saw the report saying what they had done with the idea. I think it might have worked but then the project was canceled so the patent was never filed, too bad -- for a software guy to be named on a die attach patent would have been fun. paul