The important features of this new product advance, aside from size and weight reduction, are the potential for improved reliability and reduced cost. Under the direction of the Electronic Technology Laboratory, Texas Instruments is engaged in a wide variety of molecular electronic programs. These include the investigation of new design techniques, experimental design of linear functions, custom design of digital functions, manufacturing techniques, and the development of a molecular electronic PCM telemetry encoder. The computer is a serial binary fixed-point machine with an operand word length of 10 bits plus sign. It uses synchronous logic, being timed from an internal 100-kilocycle clock.
Computer memory is divided into two parts, the operand memory and instruction memory.
While the molecular electronic computer is a general purpose computer, it was programmed in the demonstration today to simulate a desk calculator, and performed addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and square root calculations. A manual control unit provided the means of demonstrating both the conventional and molecular electronic computers, whose electrical designs are identical. Three types of semiconductor networks were used in the tiny computer, RS flip-flop, NOR gates, and logic drivers. The total power dissipation of the computer is 17 watts. The computer of 47 modules is plugged into a computer matrix, each module containing an average of 12 networks and occupying approximately 0.057 cu in and weighing 0.04 ounce.