About the web page I posted the link for yesterday:
http://www.4004.com/
I emailed the owner of the site to ask a question and got an interesting response:
The right-hand 4004 exhibit photo at the top of the page looks like a 4004 reproduced with
surface mount devices on a PC board. Is that what it is? If so, where is it specifically
discussed in the text?
Thanks,
Bill
Hi Bill,
Those are indeed surface-mount transistors positioned where the original transistors are
on the chip, but the photo is of a non-functional prototype currently on exhibit at the
Intel Museum. Alas, we are still working on our ultimate goal of building a fully
functional reproduction of the 4004, and displaying that in a museum or two. There is no
write-up because this ambitious part of the saga is still in-progress, and because
we're all busy professionals with "day jobs," there is currently no
estimated completion date.
Since you expressed an interest, here's where we're at: we have a verified netlist
from the schematics, and an unverified netlist we painstakingly extracted from the mask
artwork. It contains key geometry information we need for layout and routing, but also
some errors we need to find and fix. We ran into a snag reconciling the two netlists (it
is an "NP hard" problem), but I think we're getting close to a solution.
Then we can move to the PC board layout stage, build another giant prototype, and start
debugging... I'm crossing my fingers and praying that we can finish the project by
this upcoming 37th anniversary of the 4004 product announcement back on November 15 of
1971.
--Tim