Pictures of Vintage ICs - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 23, 2018, 02:52:00 am
content: Hunting for some parts and came across this old gem. This started out as a discrete circuit built. Then onto a full custom IC. The first pass was about 6 or so ICs like this, put on some perf board and wired. Eventually, it became one IC. The final part was fairly common as you would expect. To save cost, you can see how we are sharing.Somewhere I have the final part stuck in a plastic try. The person who laid it out had an interesting logo.

author: dexters_lab
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 25, 2018, 10:18:38 am
content: that's quite cool! So you shared space on a wafer? What was the IC for?i started a gold-ceramic collection a while back, it's mostly 80s/90s vintage but there is a 1975 dated intel c8702a eprom in there

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2018, 10:43:52 am
content: Gotta give a LOT of love for the gold topped 68ks and the Pentium Pro. Purple and gold is so much more fun to look at than just some black resin.This isn't mine, though that would be cool. This is a KA820 CPU module board for a VAX 8200 or 8300. The interesting thing I've noticed about it, is the chip on the bottom right. It appears to be a dual width DIP chip. It's the coolest and most insane thing I've ever seen.

author: dexters_lab
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 25, 2018, 10:52:35 am
content: Quote from: TwoOfFive on February 25, 2018, 10:43:52 amyea, not seen anything like that before!

author: Gyro
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2018, 11:33:41 am
content: DEC were big on that sort of thing, the first time they did it was on the F11 CPU and again on the J11 (PDP11/53,73 etc) - that one was large and pretty.

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2018, 02:13:34 pm
content: Here's something affordablehttp://www.ebay.ca/itm/SRAM-MK4332D-3-Mostek-Vintage-Unique-Ceramic-MODULE-MK4332D-LAST-ONES/391568278039?hash=item5b2b49c217:g:5KYAAOSwnDZT6je6and kind of weird.

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2018, 02:35:10 pm
content: Oooh and I have one of these (well, a 12C508)https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C72Zb6rVQAErcxi.jpg

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2018, 03:08:42 pm
content: I don't have much of old ICs in my collection; these are maybe the most unusual to me.I didn't know RCA was making SRAM as late as '88. Then again, I never saw RCA making semiconductors in my lifetime -- they divested that a long time ago, indeed.The PICs I don't think are all that remarkable actually, but just to tease Alex; mine's bigger.The COP8 is a pretty basic, ordinary, but pretty obscure, microcontroller. Amazingly enough, it's still supported to this day! Example:https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/texas-instruments/COP8SGE728M8-NOPB/COP8SGE728M8-NOPB-ND/366487Not cheap by any means, but I'm guessing it's used in a lot of military stuff or something, hence the need to keep it alive?I have a couple chips older than 1980, I think? Forget what, I didn't run across them when I was digging these out. I don't recall having any white ceramic parts. The RCA package is different, much more gray and silvery colored (I wonder if the lid is just soldered on -- and I wonder if it's 90 or 100% Pb instead of AuSn?). To me, it seems somewhat more remarkable that a lot of these chips are as new as they are -- late 90s. It seems so strange to see CERDIPs from that era.Most of these older chips came from a junk box, that must've been left over from a design engineer long ago. Seems to span 80s to early 00s, everything from ATmega to Z80, with a "golden age" centered on 90s embedded systems: lots of EPROMs, SRAMs, 8 and 12 bit DACs, and some PALs and early CPLDs.Tim

author: Gyro
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2018, 03:41:33 pm
content: Quote from: TwoOfFive on February 25, 2018, 10:43:52 amIf you want to see what the dies inside the ICs on that V-11 (Scorpio) chipset CPU board look like...http://simh.trailing-edge.com/semi/v11.htmlThe Multi-chip module contains the five DC327 ROM/RAM chips needed to contain the full VAX instruction set microcode.Ithinkthe final DEC (circular heatsink) chip, top left, is the VAX-BI bus controller.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2018, 04:05:06 pm
content: How about this one, hanging on my wall in a frame now.crDSC01484bySeanB_ZA, on Flickr

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2018, 04:28:44 pm
content: Quote from: T3sl4co1l on February 25, 2018, 03:08:42 pmIt's not about size, it's aboutcuteness!Come on, a 8 pin ceramic DIP with a quartz window?

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2018, 06:15:55 pm
content: Burr Brown used to make thick film hybrids that were sufficiently pretty that they made a calendar out of them.See more athttps://entertaininghacks.wordpress.com/2015/07/07/images-of-late-70s-burr-brown-thick-film-hybrid-ics/

author: Gyro
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2018, 07:21:49 pm
content: I like the Silicon on Silicon one!

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2018, 08:10:21 pm
content: Quote from: T3sl4co1l on February 25, 2018, 03:08:42 pmI used a few of the National COP parts because they were fairly low cost. It took some getting used to the instruction set before I was efficient at it.This was a coprocessor out of an old Z80 based machine.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2018, 08:17:00 pm
content: Quote from: Alex Eisenhut on February 25, 2018, 02:35:10 pmThat's dang awesome. I've never seen a ceramic/gold DIP-8 package before.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2018, 08:18:04 pm
content: The first microcontroller I used was the Motorola MC6801. If you watch any of my videos where I transient test the meters, the newer generator was made on a wirewrap board using this same microcontroller in my attempt to remember the better years gone by. Let me just say, they were not so great. Fitting all that code into a few K took some work and wire wrapping is no fun.We would use the MC68701 to develop with, then have masked parts produced. None of this buggy code as you normally bought 10's of thousands off the mask.Later Hitachi came out with a CMOS version of it. The top part is an OTP.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2018, 08:24:18 pm
content: Dexter's lab has a BB part. Here is an old ADC.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2018, 08:26:11 pm
content: For the digital fans, here's some early Altera parts.

author: dexters_lab
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 27, 2018, 07:02:39 pm
content: Quote from: joeqsmith on February 25, 2018, 08:26:11 pmloads of that kind of thing around here! quantel must have bought them by the truckload

author: Richard Crowley
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 27, 2018, 07:14:13 pm
content: At some intermediate step in the evolution of microcontrollers, we didn't have the technology to make non-volatile memory and the processor logic on the same chip. So kludgy things like this were used to combine the firmware storage on an EPROM which plugged into the CPU package.

author: Kjelt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 27, 2018, 07:22:42 pm
content: Quote from: Richard Crowley on February 27, 2018, 07:14:13 pmAFAIK these were also the first of a kind versions for a new microcontroller to be able to easily "reprogram" during debugging instead of erasing the processor you had a bunch op eproms which were much cheaper to have around.I could repair a Philips laservision player from the begin of the 70s just because they had these piggyback chips

author: bsudbrink
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 27, 2018, 07:36:09 pm
content: I've used a number of vintage ICs in the Cyclops cameras that I have built. There are pictures of them on my web site:http://wsudbrink.dyndns.org:8080/cyclops/index.htmlYou can click for larger versions of most pictures and you can see the die of a Mostek MK4008P-9 (used as the image sensor) in some of the assembly pictures. Pictures of other vintage ICs are in the "Collecting Parts" details page.

author: Kjelt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 27, 2018, 07:44:19 pm
content: Still got this little gem in its original alufoiled inside covered box, 24kB SRAM for the Tandy Model 200.They only had 8kB chips in those days so they put three of them on a ceramic carrier and added a H138 address decoder

author: dexters_lab
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 27, 2018, 08:52:04 pm
content: Quote from: Kjelt on February 27, 2018, 07:44:19 pmthose ceramic hybrid sram things seem to have been very popular, did the sram makers stop making them in pdip or something?

author: Kjelt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 27, 2018, 11:28:59 pm
content: Quote from: dexters_lab on February 27, 2018, 08:52:04 pmI am not exactly sure that I understand your question.In any case the Tandy Model200 and 100 were the portable small computers of that day, lcd display, running on AA batteries for what I remember 12 hours or something like that, size did matter. So 8kB pdip srams would occupy too much space.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2018, 02:53:04 am
content: Quote from: Kjelt on February 27, 2018, 07:22:42 pmI plugged a ROM emulator into that Hitachi part to develop the code for the transient generator.

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2018, 03:54:37 am
content: Quote from: Kjelt on February 27, 2018, 07:44:19 pmThat would look sweet on my VIC-20...

author: dexters_lab
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 28, 2018, 09:01:16 am
content: Quote from: Kjelt on February 27, 2018, 11:28:59 pmthere just seems to be a lot of ceramic pdip hybrids that have multiple smd srams mounted on them, i have some in my little collection, like the world needed pdip parts but the makers were only producing smd