Pictures of Vintage ICs

[joeqsmith]

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.   

[dexters_lab]

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

[Ampera]

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.

[dexters_lab]

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.

yea, not seen anything like that before!

[Gyro]

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. 

[Alex Eisenhut]

Here's something affordable

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/SRAM-MK4332D-3-Mostek-Vintage-Unique-Ceramic-MODULE-MK4332D-LAST-ONES/391568278039?hash=item5b2b49c217:g:5KYAAOSwnDZT6je6

and kind of weird.

[Alex Eisenhut]

Oooh and I have one of these (well, a 12C508)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C72Zb6rVQAErcxi.jpg

[T3sl4co1l]

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/366487  Not 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

[Gyro]

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.

If 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.html 

The Multi-chip module contains the five DC327 ROM/RAM chips needed to contain the full VAX instruction set microcode.

I think the final DEC (circular heatsink) chip, top left, is the VAX-BI bus controller.

[SeanB]

How about this one, hanging on my wall in a frame now.

crDSC01484 by SeanB_ZA, on Flickr

[Alex Eisenhut]

The PICs I don't think are all that remarkable actually, but just to tease Alex; mine's bigger.

It's not about size, it's about cuteness!  Come on, a 8 pin ceramic DIP with a quartz window?

[tggzzz]

Burr Brown used to make thick film hybrids that were sufficiently pretty that they made a calendar out of them.

See more at https://entertaininghacks.wordpress.com/2015/07/07/images-of-late-70s-burr-brown-thick-film-hybrid-ics/

[Gyro]

I like the Silicon on Silicon one! 

[joeqsmith]

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/366487  Not 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 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. 

[Ampera]

Oooh and I have one of these (well, a 12C508)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C72Zb6rVQAErcxi.jpg

That's dang awesome. I've never seen a ceramic/gold DIP-8 package before.

[joeqsmith]

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.

[joeqsmith]

Dexter's lab has a BB part.  Here is an old ADC.     

[joeqsmith]

For the digital fans, here's some early Altera parts.

[dexters_lab]

For the digital fans, here's some early Altera parts.

loads of that kind of thing around here! quantel must have bought them by the truckload 

[Richard Crowley]

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.

[Kjelt]

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.

AFAIK 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 

[bsudbrink]

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.html

You 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.

[Kjelt]

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 

[dexters_lab]

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 

those ceramic hybrid sram things seem to have been very popular, did the sram makers stop making them in pdip or something?

[Kjelt]

those ceramic hybrid sram things seem to have been very popular, did the sram makers stop making them in pdip or something?

I 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.