Page 40 - A Practical Guide from Design Planning to Manufacturing

16 Chapter One

This was the first serious proposal to put all the logic of a computer
processor onto a single chip. However, Hoff had no experience with
MOSFETs and did not know how to make his design a reality. The
memory chips Intel was making at the time were logically very simple
with the same basic memory cell circuit repeated over and over. Hoff’s
design would require much more complicated logic and circuit design
than any integrated circuit yet attempted. For months no progress was
made as Intel struggled to find someone who could implement Hoff’s idea.
In April 1970, Intel hired Faggin, the inventor of the silicon gate
MOSFET, away from Fairchild. On Faggin’s second day at Intel, Masatoshi
Shima, the engineering representative from Busicom, arrived from Japan
to review the design. Faggin had nothing to show him but the same plans
Shima had already reviewed half a year earlier. Shima was furious, and
Faggin finished his second day at a new job already 6 months behind
schedule. Faggin began working at a furious pace with Shima helping
to validate the design, and amazingly by February 1971 they had all four
chips working. The chips processed data 4 bits at a time and so were
named the 4000 series. The fourth chip of the series was the first micro-
processor, the Intel 4004 (Fig. 1-6).
The 4004 contained 2300 transistors and ran at a clock speed of 740 kHz,
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executing on average about 60,000 instructions per second. This gave it
the same processing power as early computers that had filled entire
rooms, but on a chip that was only 24 mm . It was an incredible engi-
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neering achievement, but at the time it was not at all clear that it had a
commercial future. The 4004 might match the performance of the fastest
computer in the world in the late 1940s, but the mainframe computers
of 1971 were hundreds of times faster. Intel began shipping the 4000
series to Busicom in March 1971, but the calculator market had become
intensely competitive and Busicom was unenthusiastic about the high cost
of the 4000 series. To make matters worse, Intel’s contract with Busicom
specified Intel could not sell the chips to anyone else. Hoff, Faggin, and
Mazor pleaded with Intel’s management to secure the right to sell to
other customers. Bob Noyce offered Busicom a reduced price for the 4000
series if they would change the contract, and desperate to cut costs in order
to stay in business Busicom agreed. By the end of 1971, Intel was mar-
keting the 4004 as a general purpose microprocessor. Busicom ultimately
sold about 100,000 of the series 4000 calculators before going out of busi-
ness in 1974. Intel would go on to become the leading manufacturer in
what was for 2003—a $27 billion a year market for microprocessors. The
incredible improvements in microprocessor performance and growth of the

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Real, “Revolution in Progress,” 12.