Chip History from 1970 to Today - Workstations and Mainframes Ride the Technology Wave
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While Windows and Intel dominated the PC space, high end workstations and mainframes remained the domain of proprietary CPU designs. In the workstation arena, Reduced Instruction Set Complexity (RISC) processors from companies like Sun Microsystems (SPARC series), IBM (POWER series), Hewlett-Packard (PA-RISC), Digital Equipment Corporation (ALPHA), and the various licensees of MIPS captured the majority of the workstation market against CISC competitors from Intel and Motorola. Meanwhile, a shrinking legacy mainframe market continued to be dominated by IBM, who in 1995 began the transition from its increasingly difficult to cool bipolar technology to a denser and much lower power CMOS technology in its mainframe offerings. But it is the PC market's voracious appetite for memory and CPU chipsets that drives the successive generations of technology to allow the lower volume workstations and legacy mainframes to also advance up the technology curve.
The System on a Chip
As the ability to pack more and more circuitry on a single chip began to outrun the microprocessor designer's capability to effectively use all of that circuitry, it became apparent that there were opportunities to pack additional system support circuitry onto the same chip instead of leaving that circuitry in separate support chips. The Intel 80186 is one early example of taking a standard 8086 CPU and integrating some of its support circuitry onto the same chip. Over time the CPU and support circuitry for an entire system (except perhaps external memory) could cost effectively be integrated into a single chip.
In certain markets where some combination of performance, size, power consumption, weight, and thermal characteristics was particularly important (think about laptop computers, cell phones, and other handheld electronic devices for only some examples), the system on a chip became an attractive alternative to other available options. To facilitate System on a Chip design, on-chip interconnect architectures began to be developed to allow libraries of integrated circuit intellectual property to be mixed and matched as needed to allow application specific Systems on a Chip to be developed by integrating previously designed components. There are many examples of these application specific Systems on a Chip in the embedded processor market today.
Challenges for Today and the Future
In a future article, I hope to discuss some of today's apparent technical barriers to continued higher levels of integration as predicted by Moore's Law, and touch on the evolution of integrated circuit packaging, design verification, design for testability, and the lowering of the voltage threshold.
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