31 Jan
2018
31 Jan
'18
7:07 p.m.
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