Here's Poll No. 3: What was the greatest chip ever made?
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Ruminations on the semiconductor industry from David Manners
Here's Poll No. 3: What was the greatest chip ever made?
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As an analog designer for me the LM324 has to be the greatest chip ever made. The LM3900, of 1972 vintage, was the first quad amplifier but its Norton, current driven, architecture meant it was sufficently weird to put most designers off. With the LM324 you get 4 conventional voltage op amps with a respectable specification. Single +5V operation and input common mode down to 0V come as a bonus. And all this for 2 cents an op amp. in volume.
I started using it when it was launched in 1974 and I still use it in almost every new design I do. You soon get used to resistor biassing the output to remove the cross over distortion from the Class B output stage. And remember not to overdrive it as this inverts the +/- inputs and causes all sorts of strange positive feedback effects. I have seen a pulse doubler circuit which takes advantage of this effect but use it at your peril.
Chris, you have a fellow-spirit in our technology editor (a former analogue circuit designer) Steve Bush who asks me to pass on this reply to your comment: 'Hooray to all of that, and the 324 has beautifully clean power-up characteristics so you can use it to hold other circuits in check until the rails are fully established.'
The 555 was 30 years the best selling chip. :) as far that I know...I liked the simplicity and the endless amount of applications far behind the intended use as timer....
Well, az, it's neck and neck with the 741 to win the poll, so a lot of people agree with you.
Intels 4004 lead the way instead of 50+ TTL chips you could do something useful with 5!
Slowly but consitantly, in a very few years nobody could do anything but trivial mental arithmatic!
I liked the LM3900 but the 324 has it for me too. Common mode down to zero made it useful for current sensing in power supply designs (but watch out for inverting on overload). A bit slow for some active filter applications but I still use it now. 555 would have been OK if it didn't crowbar the rails at every transition! 741 ruled out because it can't swing much closer than 3 volts to either rail.
Not often mentioned these days but the AY-3-8500 by General Instruments in the mid 1970s was an early LSI 'system on a chip' implementing several games with a minimal external component count. For me it was really influential showing the power of LSI and mixed signal design. It was a great design for the consumer market, more details at http://www.pong-story.com/gi.htm
Yes, well, Analogue Techie, I suppose Pong kicked off the whole gaming shooting match, as it were.
Dear David,
If by 'greatest' you meant 'largest' (and I know you didnt really) then there would only be one answer - the Anamartic whole wafer memory chip which utilised a whole 6inch wafer and went into production in 1990.
Of course the launch was well covered in Electronics Weekly at the time.
Best wishes,
Malcolm
Thanks Malcolm, that set me wondering whether Gene Amdahl's Trilogy square wafer for wafer-scale logic was bigger than Anamartic's - but I'm assuming eight inch wafers weren't available in 1982/3, so Amdahl must have used a 6 inch wafer and so his square wafer must have been smaller than Anamartic's round one! All the best, David