What is the origin of the word "mainframe", referring to a large, complex computer? Most sources agree that the term is related to the frames that held early computers, but the details are vague.1 It turns out that the history is more interesting and complicated than you'd expect.

Based on my research, the earliest computer to use the term "main frame" was the IBM 701 computer (1952), which consisted of boxes called "frames." The 701 system consisted of two power frames, a power distribution frame, an electrostatic storage frame, a drum frame, tape frames, and most importantly a main frame. The IBM 701's main frame is shown in the documentation below.2

The meaning of "mainframe" has evolved, shifting from being a part of a computer to being a type of computer. For decades, "mainframe" referred to the physical box of the computer; unlike modern usage, this "mainframe" could be a minicomputer or even microcomputer. Simultaneously, "mainframe" was a synonym for "central processing unit." In the 1970s, the modern meaning started to develop—a large, powerful computer for transaction processing or business applications—but it took decades for this meaning to replace the earlier ones. In this article, I'll examine the history of these shifting meanings in detail.

Early computers and the origin of "main frame"

Early computers used a variety of mounting and packaging techniques including panels, cabinets, racks, and bays.3 This packaging made it very difficult to install or move a computer, often requiring cranes or the removal of walls.4 To avoid these problems, the designers of the IBM 701 computer came up with an innovative packaging technique. This computer was constructed as individual units that would pass through a standard doorway, would fit on a standard elevator, and could be transported with normal trucking or aircraft facilities.7 These units were built from a metal frame with covers attached, so each unit was called a frame. The frames were named according to their function, such as the power frames and the tape frame. Naturally, the main part of the computer was called the main frame.

The IBM 701's internal documentation used "main frame" frequently to indicate the main box of the computer, alongside "power frame", "core frame", and so forth. For instance, each component in the schematics was labeled with its location in the computer, "MF" for the main frame.6 Externally, however, IBM documentation described the parts of the 701 computer as units rather than frames.5

The term "main frame" was used by a few other computers in the 1950s.8 For instance, the JOHNNIAC Progress Report (August 8, 1952) mentions that "the main frame for the JOHNNIAC is ready to receive registers" and they could test the arithmetic unit "in the JOHNNIAC main frame in October."10 An article on the RAND Computer in 1953 stated that "The main frame is completed and partially wired" The main body of a computer called ERMA is labeled "main frame" in the 1955 Proceedings of the Eastern Computer Conference.9

The progression of the word "main frame" can be seen in reports from the Ballistics Research Lab (BRL) that list almost all the computers in the United States. In the 1955 BRL report, most computers were built from cabinets or racks; the phrase "main frame" was only used with the IBM 650, 701, and 704. By 1961, the BRL report shows "main frame" appearing in descriptions of the IBM 702, 705, 709, and 650 RAMAC, as well as the Univac FILE 0, FILE I, RCA 501, READIX, and Teleregister Telefile. This shows that the use of "main frame" was increasing, but still mostly an IBM term.

The physical box of a minicomputer or microcomputer

In modern usage, mainframes are distinct from minicomputers or microcomputers. But until the 1980s, the word "mainframe" could also mean the main physical part of a minicomputer or microcomputer. For instance, a "minicomputer mainframe" was not a powerful minicomputer, but simply the main part of a minicomputer.13 For example, the PDP-11 is an iconic minicomputer, but DEC discussed its "mainframe."14. Similarly, the desktop-sized HP 2115A and Varian Data 620i computers also had mainframes.15 As late as 1981, the book Mini and Microcomputers mentioned "a minicomputer mainframe."

Even microcomputers had a mainframe: the cover of Radio Electronics (1978, above) stated, "Own your own Personal Computer: Mainframes for Hobbyists", using the definition below. An article "Introduction to Personal Computers" in Radio Electronics (Mar 1979) uses a similar meaning: "The first choice you will have to make is the mainframe or actual enclosure that the computer will sit in." The popular hobbyist magazine BYTE also used "mainframe" to describe a microprocessor's box in the 1970s and early 1980s16. BYTE sometimes used the word "mainframe" both to describe a large IBM computer and to describe a home computer box in the same issue, illustrating that the two distinct meanings coexisted.

Main frame synonymous with CPU

Words often change meaning through metonymy, where a word takes on the meaning of something closely associated with the original meaning. Through this process, "main frame" shifted from the physical frame (as a box) to the functional contents of the frame, specifically the central processing unit.17

The earliest instance that I could find of the "main frame" being equated with the central processing unit was in 1955. Survey of Data Processors stated: "The central processing unit is known by other names; the arithmetic and ligical [sic] unit, the main frame, the computer, etc. but we shall refer to it, usually, as the central processing unit." A similar definition appeared in Radio Electronics (June 1957, p37): "These arithmetic operations are performed in what is called the arithmetic unit of the machine, also sometimes referred to as the 'main frame.'"

The US Department of Agriculture's Glossary of ADP Terminology (1960) uses the definition: "MAIN FRAME - The central processor of the computer system. It contains the main memory, arithmetic unit and special register groups." I'll mention that "special register groups" is nonsense that was repeated for years.18 This definition was reused and extended in the government's Automatic Data Processing Glossary, published in 1962 "for use as an authoritative reference by all officials and employees of the executive branch of the Government" (below). This definition was reused in many other places, notably the Oxford English Dictionary.19

By the early 1980s, defining a mainframe as the CPU had become obsolete. IBM stated that "mainframe" was a deprecated term for "processing unit" in the Vocabulary for Data Processing, Telecommunications, and Office Systems (1981); the American National Dictionary for Information Processing Systems (1982) was similar. Computers and Business Information Processing (1983) bluntly stated: "According to the official definition, 'mainframe' and 'CPU' are synonyms. Nobody uses the word mainframe that way."

Mainframe vs. peripherals

Rather than defining the mainframe as the CPU, some dictionaries defined the mainframe in opposition to the "peripherals", the computer's I/O devices. The two definitions are essentially the same, but have a different focus.20 One example is the IFIP-ICC Vocabulary of Information Processing (1966) which defined "central processor" and "main frame" as "that part of an automatic data processing system which is not considered as peripheral equipment." Computer Dictionary (1982) had the definition "main frame—The fundamental portion of a computer, i.e. the portion that contains the CPU and control elements of a computer system, as contrasted with peripheral or remote devices usually of an input-output or memory nature."

One reason for this definition was that computer usage was billed for mainframe time, while other tasks such as printing results could save money by taking place directly on the peripherals without using the mainframe itself.21 A second reason was that the mainframe vs. peripheral split mirrored the composition of the computer industry, especially in the late 1960s and 1970s. Computer systems were built by a handful of companies, led by IBM. Compatible I/O devices and memory were built by many other companies that could sell them at a lower cost than IBM.22 Publications about the computer industry needed convenient terms to describe these two industry sectors, and they often used "mainframe manufacturers" and "peripheral manufacturers."

Main Frame or Mainframe?

An interesting linguistic shift is from "main frame" as two independent words to a compound word: either hyphenated "main-frame" or the single word "mainframe." This indicates the change from "main frame" being a type of frame to "mainframe" being a new concept. The earliest instance of hyphenated "main-frame" that I found was from 1959 in IBM Information Retrieval Systems Conference. "Mainframe" as a single, non-hyphenated word appears the same year in Datamation, mentioning the mainframe of the NEAC2201 computer. In 1962, the IBM 7090 Installation Instructions refer to a "Mainframe Diag[nostic] and Reliability Program." (Curiously, the document also uses "main frame" as two words in several places.) The 1962 book Information Retrieval Management discusses how much computer time document queries can take: "A run of 100 or more machine questions may require two to five minutes of mainframe time." This shows that by 1962, "main frame" had semantically shifted to a new word, "mainframe."

The rise of the minicomputer and how the "mainframe" become a class of computers

So far, I've shown how "mainframe" started as a physical frame in the computer, and then was generalized to describe the CPU. But how did "mainframe" change from being part of a computer to being a class of computers? This was a gradual process, largely happening in the mid-1970s as the rise of the minicomputer and microcomputer created a need for a word to describe large computers.

Although microcomputers, minicomputers, and mainframes are now viewed as distinct categories, this was not the case at first. For instance, a 1966 computer buyer's guide lumps together computers ranging from desk-sized to 70,000 square feet.23 Around 1968, however, the term "minicomputer" was created to describe small computers. The story is that the head of DEC in England created the term, inspired by the miniskirt and the Mini Minor car.24 While minicomputers had a specific name, larger computers did not.25

Gradually in the 1970s "mainframe" came to be a separate category, distinct from "minicomputer."2627 An early example is Datamation (1970), describing systems of various sizes: "mainframe, minicomputer, data logger, converters, readers and sorters, terminals." The influential business report EDP first split mainframes from minicomputers in 1972.28 The line between minicomputers and mainframes was controversial, with articles such as Distinction Helpful for Minis, Mainframes and Micro, Mini, or Mainframe? Confusion persists (1981) attempting to clarify the issue.29

With the development of the microprocessor, computers became categorized as mainframes, minicomputers or microcomputers. For instance, a 1975 Computerworld article discussed how the minicomputer competes against the microcomputer and mainframes. Adam Osborne's An Introduction to Microcomputers (1977) described computers as divided into mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers by price, power, and size. He pointed out the large overlap between categories and avoided specific definitions, stating that "A minicomputer is a minicomputer, and a mainframe is a mainframe, because that is what the manufacturer calls it."32

In the late 1980s, computer industry dictionaries started defining a mainframe as a large computer, often explicitly contrasted with a minicomputer or microcomputer. By 1990, they mentioned the networked aspects of mainframes.33

IBM embraces the mainframe label

Even though IBM is almost synonymous with "mainframe" now, IBM avoided marketing use of the word for many years, preferring terms such as "general-purpose computer."35 IBM's book Planning a Computer System (1962) repeatedly referred to "general-purpose computers" and "large-scale computers", but never used the word "mainframe."34 The announcement of the revolutionary System/360 (1964) didn't use the word "mainframe"; it was called a general-purpose computer system. The announcement of the System/370 (1970) discussed "medium- and large-scale systems." The System/32 introduction (1977) said, "System/32 is a general purpose computer..." The 1982 announcement of the 3804, IBM's most powerful computer at the time, called it a "large scale processor" not a mainframe.

IBM started using "mainframe" as a marketing term in the mid-1980s. For example, the 3270 PC Guide (1986) refers to "IBM mainframe computers." An IBM 9370 Information System brochure (c. 1986) says the system was "designed to provide mainframe power." IBM's brochure for the 3090 processor (1987) called them "advanced general-purpose computers" but also mentioned "mainframe computers." A System 390 brochure (c. 1990) discussed "entry into the mainframe class." The 1990 announcement of the ES/9000 called them "the most powerful mainframe systems the company has ever offered."

By 2000, IBM had enthusiastically adopted the mainframe label: the z900 announcement used the word "mainframe" six times, calling it the "reinvented mainframe." In 2003, IBM announced "The Mainframe Charter", describing IBM's "mainframe values" and "mainframe strategy." Now, IBM has retroactively applied the name "mainframe" to their large computers going back to 1959 (link), (link).

Mainframes and the general public

While "mainframe" was a relatively obscure computer term for many years, it became widespread in the 1980s. The Google Ngram graph below shows the popularity of "microcomputer", "minicomputer", and "mainframe" in books.36 The terms became popular during the late 1970s and 1980s. The popularity of "minicomputer" and "microcomputer" roughly mirrored the development of these classes of computers. Unexpectedly, even though mainframes were the earliest computers, the term "mainframe" peaked later than the other types of computers.

Dictionary definitions

I studied many old dictionaries to see when the word "mainframe" showed up and how they defined it. To summarize, "mainframe" started to appear in dictionaries in the late 1970s, first defining the mainframe in opposition to peripherals or as the CPU. In the 1980s, the definition gradually changed to the modern definition, with a mainframe distinguished as being large, fast, and often centralized system. These definitions were roughly a decade behind industry usage, which switched to the modern meaning in the 1970s.

The word didn't appear in older dictionaries, such as the Random House College Dictionary (1968) and Merriam-Webster (1974). The earliest definition I could find was in the supplement to Webster's International Dictionary (1976): "a computer and esp. the computer itself and its cabinet as distinguished from peripheral devices connected with it." Similar definitions appeared in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1976, 1980).

A CPU-based definition appeared in Random House College Dictionary (1980): "the device within a computer which contains the central control and arithmetic units, responsible for the essential control and computational functions. Also called central processing unit." The Random House Dictionary (1978, 1988 printing) was similar. The American Heritage Dictionary (1982, 1985) combined the CPU and peripheral approaches: "mainframe. The central processing unit of a computer exclusive of peripheral and remote devices."

The modern definition as a large computer appeared alongside the old definition in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1983): "mainframe (1964): a computer with its cabinet and internal circuits; also: a large fast computer that can handle multiple tasks concurrently." Only the modern definition appears in The New Merriram-Webster Dictionary (1989): "large fast computer", while Webster's Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (1989): "mainframe. a large high-speed computer with greater storage capacity than a minicomputer, often serving as the central unit in a system of smaller computers. [MAIN + FRAME]." Random House Webster's College Dictionary (1991) and Random House College Dictionary (2001) had similar definitions.

The Oxford English Dictionary is the principal historical dictionary, so it is interesting to see its view. The 1989 OED gave historical definitions as well as defining mainframe as "any large or general-purpose computer, exp. one supporting numerous peripherals or subordinate computers." It has seven historical examples from 1964 to 1984; the earliest is the 1964 Honeywell Glossary. It quotes a 1970 Dictionary of Computers as saying that the word "Originally implied the main framework of a central processing unit on which the arithmetic unit and associated logic circuits were mounted, but now used colloquially to refer to the central processor itself." The OED also cited a Hewlett-Packard ad from 1974 that used the word "mainframe", but I consider this a mistake as the usage is completely different.15

Encyclopedias

A look at encyclopedias shows that the word "mainframe" started appearing in discussions of computers in the early 1980s, later than in dictionaries. At the beginning of the 1980s, many encyclopedias focused on large computers, without using the word "mainframe", for instance, The Concise Encyclopedia of the Sciences (1980) and World Book (1980). The word "mainframe" started to appear in supplements such as Britannica Book of the Year (1980) and World Book Year Book (1981), at the same time as they started discussing microcomputers. Soon encyclopedias were using the word "mainframe", for example, Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia (1983), Encyclopedia Americana (1983), and World Book (1984). By 1986, even the Doubleday Children's Almanac showed a "mainframe computer."

Newspapers

I examined old newspapers to track the usage of the word "mainframe." The graph below shows the usage of "mainframe" in newspapers. The curve shows a rise in popularity through the 1980s and a steep drop in the late 1990s. The newspaper graph roughly matches the book graph above, although newspapers show a much steeper drop in the late 1990s. Perhaps mainframes aren't in the news anymore, but people still write books about them.

The first newspaper appearances were in classified ads seeking employees, for instance, a 1960 ad in the San Francisco Examiner for people "to monitor and control main-frame operations of electronic computers...and to operate peripheral equipment..." and a (sexist) 1966 ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer for "men with Digital Computer Bkgrnd [sic] (Peripheral or Mainframe)."37

By 1970, "mainframe" started to appear in news articles, for example, "The computer can't work without the mainframe unit." By 1971, the usage increased with phrases such as "mainframe central processor" and "'main-frame' computer manufacturers". 1972 had usages such as "the mainframe or central processing unit is the heart of any computer, and does all the calculations". A 1975 article explained "'Mainframe' is the industry's word for the computer itself, as opposed to associated items such as printers, which are referred to as 'peripherals.'" By 1980, minicomputers and microcomputers were appearing: "All hardware categories-mainframes, minicomputers, microcomputers, and terminals" and "The mainframe and the minis are interconnected."

By 1985, the mainframe was a type of computer, not just the CPU: "These days it's tough to even define 'mainframe'. One definition is that it has for its electronic brain a central processor unit (CPU) that can handle at least 32 bits of information at once. ... A better distinction is that mainframes have numerous processors so they can work on several jobs at once." Articles also discussed "the micro's challenge to the mainframe" and asked, "buy a mainframe, rather than a mini?"

By 1990, descriptions of mainframes became florid: "huge machines laboring away in glass-walled rooms", "the big burner which carries the whole computing load for an organization", "behemoth data crunchers", "the room-size machines that dominated computing until the 1980s", "the giant workhorses that form the nucleus of many data-processing centers", "But it is not raw central-processing-power that makes a mainframe a mainframe. Mainframe computers command their much higher prices because they have much more sophisticated input/output systems."

Conclusion

After extensive searches through archival documents, I found usages of the term "main frame" dating back to 1952, much earlier than previously reported. In particular, the introduction of frames to package the IBM 701 computer led to the use of the word "main frame" for that computer and later ones. The term went through various shades of meaning and remained fairly obscure for many years. In the mid-1970s, the term started describing a large computer, essentially its modern meaning. In the 1980s, the term escaped the computer industry and appeared in dictionaries, encyclopedias, and newspapers. After peaking in the 1990s, the term declined in usage (tracking the decline in mainframe computers), but the term and the mainframe computer both survive.

Two factors drove the popularity of the word "mainframe" in the 1980s with its current meaning of a large computer. First, the terms "microcomputer" and "minicomputer" led to linguistic pressure for a parallel term for large computers. For instance, the business press needed a word to describe IBM and other large computer manufacturers. While "server" is the modern term, "mainframe" easily filled the role back then and was nicely alliterative with "microcomputer" and "minicomputer."38

Second, up until the 1980s, the prototype meaning for "computer" was a large mainframe, typically IBM.39 But as millions of home computers were sold in the early 1980s, the prototypical "computer" shifted to smaller machines. This left a need for a term for large computers, and "mainframe" filled that need. In other words, if you were talking about a large computer in the 1970s, you could say "computer" and people would assume you meant a mainframe. But if you said "computer" in the 1980s, you needed to clarify if it was a large computer.

The word "mainframe" is almost 75 years old and both the computer and the word have gone through extensive changes in this time. The "death of the mainframe" has been proclaimed for well over 30 years but mainframes are still hanging on. Who knows what meaning "mainframe" will have in another 75 years?

Follow me on Bluesky (@righto.com) or RSS. (I'm no longer on Twitter.) Thanks to the Computer History Museum and archivist Sara Lott for access to many documents.

Notes and References

Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, establishing a long-running brand of processors. Earlier, I wrote about the ROM in the Pentium's floating point unit that holds constants such as π. In this post, I'll look at some interesting circuits associated with this ROM. In particular, the circuitry is implemented in BiCMOS, a process that combines bipolar transistors with standard CMOS logic.

The photo below shows the Pentium's thumbnail-sized silicon die under a microscope. I've labeled the main functional blocks; the floating point unit is in the lower right with the constant ROM highlighted at the bottom. The various parts of the floating point unit form horizontal stripes. Data buses run vertically through the floating point unit, moving values around the unit.

The diagram below shows how the circuitry in this post forms part of the Pentium. Zooming in to the bottom of the chip shows the constant ROM, holding 86-bit words: at the left, the exponent section provides 18 bits. At the right, the wider significand section provides 68 bits. Below that, the diagram zooms in on the subject of this article: one of the 86 identical multiplexer/driver circuits that provides the output from the ROM. As you can see, this circuit is a microscopic speck in the chip.

The layers

In this section, I'll show how the Pentium is constructed from layers. The bottom layer of the chip consists of transistors fabricated on the silicon die. Regions of silicon are doped with impurities to change the electrical properties; these regions appear pinkish in the photo below, compared to the grayish undoped silicon. Thin polysilicon wiring is formed on top of the silicon. Where a polysilicon line crosses doped silicon, a transistor is formed; the polysilicon creates the transistor's gate. Most of these transistors are NMOS and PMOS transistors, but there is a bipolar transistor near the upper right, the large box-like structure. The dark circles are contacts, regions where the metal layer above is connected to the polysilicon or silicon to wire the circuits together.

The Pentium has three layers of metal wiring. The photo below shows the bottom layer, called M1. For the most part, this layer of metal connects the transistors into various circuits, providing wiring over a short distance. The photos in this section show the same region of the chip, so you can match up features between the photos. For instance, the contacts below (black circles) match the black circles above, showing how this metal layer connects to the silicon and polysilicon circuits. You can see some of the silicon and polysilicon in this image, but most of it is hidden by the metal.

The M2 metal layer (below) sits above the M1 wiring. In this part of the chip, the M2 wires are horizontal. The thicker lines are power and ground. (Because they are thicker, they have lower resistance and can provide the necessary current to the underlying circuitry.) The thinner lines are control signals. The floating point unit is structured so functional blocks are horizontal, while data is transmitted vertically. Thus, a horizontal wire can supply a control signal to all the bits in a functional block.

The M3 layer is the top metal layer in the Pentium. It is thicker, so it is better suited for the chip's main power and ground lines as well as long-distance bus wiring. In the photo below, the wide line on the left provides power, while the wide line on the right provides ground. The power and ground are distributed through wiring in the M2 and M1 layers until they are connected to the underlying transistors. At the top of the photo, vertical bus lines are visible; these extend for long distances through the floating point unit. Notice the slightly longer line, fourth from the right. This line provides one bit of data from the ROM, provided by the circuitry described below. The dot near the bottom is a via, connecting this line to a short wire in M2, connected to a wire in M1, connected to the silicon of the output transistors.

The circuits for the ROM's output

The simplified schematic below shows the circuit that I reverse-engineered. This circuit is repeated 86 times, once for each bit in the ROM's word. You might expect the ROM to provide a single 86-bit word. However, to make the layout work better, the ROM provides eight words in parallel. Thus, the circuitry must select one of the eight words with a multiplexer. In particular, each of the 86 circuits has an 8-to-1 multiplexer to select one bit out of the eight. This bit is then stored in a latch. Finally, a high-current driver amplifies the signal so it can be sent through a bus, traveling to a destination halfway across the floating point unit.

I'll provide a quick review of MOS transistors before I explain the circuitry in detail. CMOS circuitry uses two types of transistors—PMOS and NMOS—which are similar but also opposites. A PMOS transistor is turned on by a low signal on the gate, while an NMOS transistor is turned on by a high signal on the gate; the PMOS symbol has an inversion bubble on the gate. A PMOS transistor works best when pulling its output high, while an NMOS transistor works best when pulling its output low. CMOS circuitry normally uses the two types of MOS transistors in a Complementary fashion to implement logic gates, working together. What makes the circuits below interesting is that they often use NMOS and PMOS transistors independently.

The detailed schematic below shows the circuitry at the transistor and inverter level. I'll go through each of the components in the remainder of this post.

The ROM is constructed as a grid: at each grid point, the ROM can have a transistor for a 0 bit, or no transistor for a 1 bit. Thus, the data is represented by the transistor pattern. The ROM holds 304 constants so there are 304 potential transistors associated with each bit of the output word. These transistors are organized in a 38×8 grid. To select a word from the ROM, a select line activates one group of eight potential transistors. Each transistor is connected to ground, so the transistor (if present) will pull the associated line low, for a 0 bit. Note that the ROM itself consists of only NMOS transistors, making it half the size of a truly CMOS implementation. For more information on the structure and contents of the ROM, see my earlier article.

A ROM transistor can pull a line low for a 0 bit, but how does the line get pulled high for a 1 bit? This is accomplished by a precharge transistor on each line. Before a read from the ROM, the precharge transistors are all activated, pulling the lines high. If a ROM transistor is present on the line, the line will next be pulled low, but otherwise it will remain high due to the capacitance on the line.

Next, the multiplexer above selects one of the 8 lines, depending on which word is being accessed. The multiplexer consists of eight transistors. One transistor is activated by a select line, allowing the ROM's signal to pass through. The other seven transistors are in the off state, blocking those ROM signals. Thus, the multiplexer selects one of the 8 bits from the ROM.

The circuit below is the "keeper." As explained above, each ROM line is charged high before reading the ROM. However, this charge can fade away. The job of the keeper is to keep the multiplexer's output high until it is pulled low. This is implemented by an inverter connected to a PMOS transistor. If the signal on the line is high, the PMOS transistor will turn on, pulling the line high. (Note that a PMOS transistor is turned on by a low signal, thus the inverter.) If the ROM pulls the line low, the transistor will turn off and stop pulling the line high. This transistor is very weak, so it is easily overpowered by the signal from the ROM. The transistor on the left ensures that the line is high at the start of the cycle.

The diagram below shows the transistors for the keeper. The two transistors on the left implement a standard CMOS inverter. On the right, note the weak transistor that holds the line high. You might notice that the weak transistor looks larger and wonder why that makes the transistor weak rather than strong. The explanation is that the transistor is large in the "wrong" dimension. The current capacity of an MOS transistor is proportional to the width/length ratio of its gate. (Width is usually the long dimension and length is usually the skinny dimension.) The weak transistor's length is much larger than the other transistors, so the W/L ratio is smaller and the transistor is weaker. (You can think of the transistor's gate as a bridge between its two sides. A wide bridge with many lanes lets lots of traffic through. However, a long, single-lane bridge will slow down the traffic.)

Next, we come to the latch, which remembers the value read from the ROM. This latch will read its input when the load signal is high. When the load signal goes low, the latch will hold its value. Conceptually, the latch is implemented with the circuit below. A multiplexer selects the lower input when the load signal is active, passing the latch input through to the (inverted) output. But when the load signal goes low, the multiplexer will select the top input, which is feedback of the value in the latch. This signal will cycle through the inverters and the multiplexer, holding the value until a new value is loaded. The inverters are required because the multiplexer itself doesn't provide any amplification; the signal would rapidly die out if not amplified by the inverters.

The multiplexer is implemented with two CMOS switches, one to select each multiplexer input. Each switch is a pair of PMOS and NMOS transistors that turn on together, allowing a signal to pass through. (See the bottom two transistors below.)1 The upper circuit is trickier. Conceptually, it is an inverter feeding into the multiplexer's CMOS switch. However, the order is switched so the switch feeds into the inverter. The result is not-exactly-a-switch and not-exactly-an-inverter, but the result is the same. You can also view it as an inverter with power and ground that gets cut off when not selected. I suspect this implementation uses slightly less power than the straightforward implementation.

The most unusual circuit is the BiCMOS driver. By adding a few extra processing steps to the regular CMOS manufacturing process, bipolar (NPN and PNP) transistors can be created. The Pentium extensively used BiCMOS circuits since they reduced signal delays by up to 35%. Intel also used BiCMOS for the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, and Xeon processors. However, as chip voltages dropped, the benefit from bipolar transistors dropped too and BiCMOS was eventually abandoned.

In the Pentium, BiCMOS drivers are used when signals must travel a long distance across the chip. (In this case, the ROM output travels about halfway up the floating point unit.) These long wires have a lot of capacitance so a high-current driver circuit is needed and the NPN transistor provides extra "oomph."

The diagram below shows how the driver is implemented. The NPN transistor is the large boxy structure in the upper right. When the base (B) is pulled high, current flows from the collector (C), pulling the emitter (E) high and thus rapidly pulling the output high. The remainder of the circuit consists of three inverters, each composed of PMOS and NMOS transistors. When a polysilicon line crosses doped silicon, it creates a transistor gate, so each crossing corresponds to a transistor. The inverters use multiple transistors in parallel to provide more current; the transistor sources and/or drains overlap to make the circuitry more compact.

One interesting thing about this circuit is that each inverter is carefully designed to provide the desired current, with a different current for a high output versus a low output. The first transistor (purple boxes) has two PMOS transistors and two NMOS transistors, so it is a regular inverter, balanced for high and low outputs. (This inverter is conceptually part of the latch.) The second inverter (yellow boxes) has three large PMOS transistors and one smaller NMOS transistor, so it has more ability to pull the output high than low. This transistor turns on the NPN transistor by providing a high signal to the base, so it needs more current in the high state. The third inverter (green boxes) has one weak PMOS transistor and seven NMOS transistors, so it can pull its output low strongly, but can barely pull its output high. This transistor pulls the ROM output line low, so it needs enough current to drive the entire bus line. But this transistor doesn't need to pull the output high—that's the job of the NPN transistor—so the PMOS transistor can be weak. The construction of the weak transistor is similar to the keeper's weak transistor; its gate length is much larger than the other transistors, so it provides less current.

Conclusions

The diagram below shows how the functional blocks are arranged in the complete circuit, from the ROM at the bottom to the output at the top. The floating point unit is constructed with a constant width for each bit—38.5 µm—so the circuitry is designed to fit into this width. The layout of this circuitry was hand-optimized to fit as tightly as possible, In comparison, much of the Pentium's circuitry was arranged by software using a standard-cell approach, which is much easier to design but not as dense. Since each bit in the floating point unit is repeated many times, hand-optimization paid off here.

This circuit contains 47 transistors. Since it is duplicated once for each bit, it has 4042 transistors in total, a tiny fraction of the Pentium's 3.1 million transistors. In comparison, the MOS 6502 processor has about 3500-4500 transistors, depending on how you count. In other words, the circuit to select a word from the Pentium's ROM is about as complex as the entire 6502 processor. This illustrates the dramatic growth in processor complexity described by Moore's law.

I plan to write more about the Pentium so follow me on Bluesky (@righto.com) or RSS for updates. (I'm no longer on Twitter.) You might enjoy reading about the Pentium Navajo rug.

Notes

Addition is harder than you'd expect, at least for a computer. Computers use multiple types of adder circuits with different tradeoffs of size versus speed. In this article, I reverse-engineer an 8-bit adder in the Pentium's floating point unit. This adder turns out to be a carry-lookahead adder, in particular, a type known as "Kogge-Stone."1 In this article, I'll explain how a carry-lookahead adder works and I'll show how the Pentium implemented it. Warning: lots of Boolean logic ahead.

The die photo above shows the main functional units of the Pentium. The adder, in the lower right, is a small component of the floating point unit. It is not a general-purpose adder, but is used only for determining quotient digits during division. It played a role in the famous Pentium FDIV division bug, which I wrote about here.

The hardware implementation

The photo below shows the carry-lookahead adder used by the divider. The adder itself consists of the circuitry highlighted in red. At the top, logic gates compute signals in parallel for each of the 8 pairs of inputs: partial sum, carry generate, and carry propagate. Next, the complex carry-lookahead logic determines in parallel if there will be a carry at each position. Finally, XOR gates apply the carry to each bit. Note that the sum/generate/propagate circuitry consists of 8 repeated blocks, and the same with the carry XOR circuitry. The carry lookahead circuitry, however, doesn't have any visible structure since it is different for each bit.2

The large amount of circuitry in the middle is used for testing; see the footnote.3 At the bottom, the drivers amplify control signals for various parts of the circuit.

The carry-lookahead adder concept

The problem with addition is that carries make addition slow. Consider calculating 99999+1 by hand. You'll start with 9+1=10, then carry the one, generating another carry, which generates another carry, and so forth, until you go through all the digits. Computer addition has the same problem: If you're adding two numbers, the low-order bits can generate a carry that then propagates through all the bits. An adder that works this way—known as a ripple carry adder—will be slow because the carry has to ripple through all the bits. As a result, CPUs use special circuits to make addition faster.

One solution is the carry-lookahead adder. In this adder, all the carry bits are computed in parallel, before computing the sums. Then, the sum bits can be computed in parallel, using the carry bits. As a result, the addition can be completed quickly, without waiting for the carries to ripple through the entire sum.

It may seem impossible to compute the carries without computing the sum first, but there's a way to do it. For each bit position, you determine signals called "carry generate" and "carry propagate". These signals can then be used to determine all the carries in parallel. The generate signal indicates that the position generates a carry. For instance, if you add binary 1xx and 1xx (where x is an arbitrary bit), a carry will be generated from the top bit, regardless of the unspecified bits. On the other hand, adding 0xx and 0xx will never produce a carry. Thus, the generate signal is produced for the first case but not the second.

But what about 1xx plus 0xx? We might get a carry, for instance, 111+001, but we might not get a carry, for instance, 101+001. In this "maybe" case, we set the carry propagate signal, indicating that a carry into the position will get propagated out of the position. For example, if there is a carry out of the middle position, 1xx+0xx will have a carry from the top bit. But if there is no carry out of the middle position, then there will not be a carry from the top bit. In other words, the propagate signal indicates that a carry into the top bit will be propagated out of the top bit.

To summarize, adding 1+1 will generate a carry. Adding 0+1 or 1+0 will propagate a carry. Thus, the generate signal is formed at each position by G_n = A_n·B_n, where A and B are the inputs. The propagate signal is P_n = A_n+B_n, the logical-OR of the inputs.4

Now that the propagate and generate signals are defined, they can be used to compute the carry C_n at each bit position:
C₁ = G₀: a carry into bit 1 occurs if a carry is generated from bit 0.
C₂ = G₁ + G₀P₁: A carry into bit 2 occur if bit 1 generates a carry or bit 1 propagates a carry from bit 0.
C₃ = G₂ + G₁P₂ + G₀P₁P₂: A carry into bit 3 occurs if bit 2 generates a carry, or bit 2 propagates a carry generated from bit 1, or bits 2 and 1 propagate a carry generated from bit 0.
C₄ = G₃ + G₂P₃ + G₁P₂P₃ + G₀P₁P₂P₃: A carry into bit 4 occurs if a carry is generated from bit 3, 2, 1, or 0 along with the necessary propagate signals.
... and so forth, getting more complicated with each bit ...

The important thing about these equations is that they can be computed in parallel, without waiting for a carry to ripple through each position. Once each carry is computed, the sum bits can be computed in parallel: S_n = A_n ⊕ B_n ⊕ C_n. In other words, the two input bits and the computed carry are combined with exclusive-or.

Implementing carry lookahead with a parallel prefix adder

The straightforward way to implement carry lookahead is to directly implement the equations above. However, this approach requires a lot of circuitry due to the complicated equations. Moreover, it needs gates with many inputs, which are slow for electrical reasons.5

The Pentium's adder implements the carry lookahead in a different way, called the "parallel prefix adder."7 The idea is to produce the propagate and generate signals across ranges of bits, not just single bits as before. For instance, the propagate signal P₃₂ indicates that a carry in to bit 2 would be propagated out of bit 3. And G₃₀ indicates that bits 3 to 0 generate a carry out of bit 3.

Using some mathematical tricks,6 you can take the P and G values for two smaller ranges and merge them into the P and G values for the combined range. For instance, you can start with the P and G values for bits 0 and 1, and produce P₁₀ and G₁₀. These could be merged with P₃₂ and G₃₂ to produce P₃₀ and G₃₀, indicating if a carry is propagated across bits 3-0 or generated by bits 3-0. Note that G_n0 is the carry-lookahead value we need for bit n, so producing these G values gives the results that we need from the carry-lookahead implementation.

This merging process is more efficient than the "brute force" implementation of the carry-lookahead logic since logic subexpressions can be reused. This merging process can be implemented in many ways, including Kogge-Stone, Brent-Kung, and Ladner-Fischer. The different algorithms have different tradeoffs of performance versus circuit area. In the next section, I'll show how the Pentium implements the Kogge-Stone algorithm.

The Pentium's implementation of the carry-lookahead adder

The Pentium's adder is implemented with four layers of circuitry. The first layer produces the propagate and generate signals (P and G) for each bit, along with a partial sum (the sum without any carries). The second layer merges pairs of neighboring P and G values, producing, for instance G₆₅ and P₂₁. The third layer generates the carry-lookahead bits by merging previous P and G values. This layer is complicated because it has different circuitry for each bit. Finally, the fourth layer applies the carry bits to the partial sum, producing the final arithmetic sum.

Here is the schematic of the adder, from my reverse engineering. The circuit in the upper left is repeated 8 times to produce the propagate, generate, and partial sum for each bit. This corresponds to the first layer of logic. At the left are the circuits to merge the generate and propagate signals across pairs of bits. These circuits are the second layer of logic.

The circuitry at the right is the interesting part—it computes the carries in parallel and then computes the final sum bits using XOR. This corresponds to the third and fourth layers of circuitry respectively. The circuitry gets more complicated going from bottom to top as the bit position increases.

The diagram below is the standard diagram that illustrates how a Kogge-Stone adder works. It's rather abstract, but I'll try to explain it. The diagram shows how the P and G signals are merged to produce each output at the bottom. Each line coresponds to both the P and the G signal. Each square box generates the P and G signals for that bit. (Confusingly, the vertical and diagonal lines have the same meaning, indicating inputs going into a diamond and outputs coming out of a diamond.) Each diamond combines two ranges of P and G signals to generate new P and G signals for the combined range. Thus, the signals cover wider ranges as they progress downward, ending with the G_n0 signals that are the outputs.

It may be easier to understand the diagram by starting with the outputs. I've highlighted two circuits: The purple circuit computes the carry into bit 3 (out of bit 2), while the green circuit computes the carry into bit 7 (out of bit 6). Following the purple output upward, note that it forms a tree reaching bits 2, 1, and 0, so it generates the carry based on these bits, as desired. In more detail, the upper purple diamond combines the P and G signals for bits 2 and 1, generating P₂₁ and G₂₁. The lower purple diamond merges in P₀ and G₀ to create P₂₀ and G₂₀. Signal G₂₀ indicates of bits 2 through 0 generate a carry; this is the desired carry value into bit 3.

Now, look at the green output and see how it forms a tree going upward, combining bits 6 through 0. Notice how it takes advantage of the purple carry output, reducing the circuitry required. It also uses P₆₅, P₄₃, and the corresponding G signals. Comparing with the earlier schematic shows how the diagram corresponds to the schematic, but abstracts out the details of the gates.

Comparing the diagram to the schematic, each square box corresponds to to the circuit in the upper left of the schematic that generates P and G, the first layer of circuitry. The first row of diamonds corresponds to the pairwise combination circuitry on the left of the schematic, the second layer of circuitry. The remaining diamonds correspond to the circuitry on the right of the schematic, with each column corresponding to a bit, the third layer of circuitry. (The diagram ignores the final XOR step, the fourth layer of circuitry.)

Next, I'll show how the diagram above, the logic equations, and the schematic are related. The diagram below shows the logic equation for C₇ and how it is implemented with gates; this corresponds to the green diamonds above. The gates on the left below computes G₆₃; this corresponds to the middle green diamond on the left. The next gate below computes P₆₃ from P₆₅ and P₄₃; this corresponds to the same green diamond. The last gates mix in C₃ (the purple line above); this corresponds to the bottom green diamond. As you can see, the diamonds abstract away the complexity of the gates. Finally, the colored boxes below show how the gate inputs map onto the logic equation. Each input corresponds to multiple terms in the equation (6 inputs replace 28 terms), showing how this approach reduces the circuitry required.

There are alternatives to the Kogge-Stone adder. For example, a Brent-Kung adder (below) uses a different arrangement with fewer diamonds but more layers. Thus, a Brent-Kung adder uses less circuitry but is slower. (You can follow each output upward to verify that the tree reaches the correct inputs.)

Conclusions

The photo below shows the adder circuitry. I've removed the top two layers of metal, leaving the bottom layer of metal. Underneath the metal, polysilicon wiring and doped silicon regions are barely visible; they form the transistors. At the top are eight blocks of gates to generate the partial sum, generate, and propagate signals for each bit. (This corresponds to the first layer of circuitry as described earlier.) In the middle is the carry lookahead circuitry. It is irregular since each bit has different circuitry. (This corresponds to the second and third layers of circuitry, jumbled together.) At the bottom, eight XOR gates combine the carry lookahead output with the partial sum to produce the adder's output. (This corresponds to the fourth layer of circuitry.)

The Pentium uses many adders for different purposes: in the integer unit, in the floating point unit, and for address calculation, among others. Floating-point division is known to use a carry-save adder to hold the partial remainder at each step; see my post on the Pentium FDIV division bug for details. I don't know what types of adders are used in other parts of the chip, but maybe I'll reverse-engineer some of them. Follow me on Bluesky (@righto.com) or RSS for updates. (I'm no longer on Twitter.)

Footnotes and references

The cargo cult metaphor is commonly used by programmers. This metaphor was popularized by Richard Feynman's "cargo cult science" talk with a vivid description of South Seas cargo cults. However, this metaphor has three major problems. First, the pop-culture depiction of cargo cults is inaccurate and fictionalized, as I'll show. Second, the metaphor is overused and has contradictory meanings making it a lazy insult. Finally, cargo cults are portrayed as an amusing story of native misunderstanding but the background is much darker: cargo cults are a reaction to decades of oppression of Melanesian islanders and the destruction of their culture. For these reasons, the cargo cult metaphor is best avoided.

In this post, I'll describe some cargo cults from 1919 to the present. These cargo cults are completely different from the description of cargo cults you usually find on the internet, which I'll call the "pop-culture cargo cult." Cargo cults are extremely diverse, to the extent that anthropologists disagree on the cause, definition, or even if the term has value. I'll show that many of the popular views of cargo cults come from a 1962 "shockumentary" called Mondo Cane. Moreover, most online photos of cargo cults are fake.

Feynman and Cargo Cult Science

The cargo cult metaphor in science started with Professor Richard Feynman's well-known 1974 commencement address at Caltech.1 This speech, titled "Cargo Cult Science", was expanded into a chapter in his best-selling 1985 book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman". He said:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

But the standard anthropological definition of "cargo cult" is entirely different: 2

Cargo cults are strange religious movements in the South Pacific that appeared during the last few decades. In these movements, a prophet announces the imminence of the end of the world in a cataclysm which will destroy everything. Then the ancestors will return, or God, or some other liberating power, will appear, bringing all the goods the people desire, and ushering in a reign of eternal bliss.

An anthropology encyclopedia gives a similar definition:

A southwest Pacific example of messianic or millenarian movements once common throughout the colonial world, the modal cargo cult was an agitation or organised social movement of Melanesian villagers in pursuit of ‘cargo’ by means of renewed or invented ritual action that they hoped would induce ancestral spirits or other powerful beings to provide. Typically, an inspired prophet with messages from those spirits persuaded a community that social harmony and engagement in improvised ritual (dancing, marching, flag-raising) or revived cultural traditions would, for believers, bring them cargo.

As you may see, the pop-culture explanation of a cargo cult and the anthropological definition are completely different, apart from the presence of "cargo" of some sort. Have anthropologists buried cargo cults under layers of theory? Are they even discussing the same thing? My conclusion, after researching many primary sources, is that the anthropological description accurately describes the wide variety of cargo cults. The pop-culture cargo cult description, however, takes features of some cargo cults (the occasional runway) and combines this with movie scenes to yield an inaccurate and fictionalized dscription. It may be hard to believe that the description of cargo cults that you see on the internet is mostly wrong, but in the remainder of this article, I will explain this in detail.

Background on Melanesia

Cargo cults occur in a specific region of the South Pacific called Melanesia. I'll give a brief (oversimplified) description of Melanesia to provide important background. The Pacific Ocean islands are divided into three cultural areas: Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia. Polynesia is the best known, including Hawaii, New Zealand, and Samoa. Micronesia, in the northwest, consists of thousands of small islands, of which Guam is the largest; the name "Micronesia" is Greek for "small island". Melanesia, the relevant area for this article, is a group of islands between Micronesia and Australia, including Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, and New Guinea. (New Guinea is the world's second-largest island; confusingly, the country of Papua New Guinea occupies the eastern half of the island, while the western half is part of Indonesia.)

The inhabitants of Melanesia typically lived in small villages of under 200 people, isolated by mountainous geography. They had a simple, subsistence economy, living off cultivated root vegetables, pigs, and hunting. People tended their own garden, without specialization into particular tasks. The people of Melanesia are dark-skinned, which will be important ("Melanesia" and "melanin" have the same root). Technologically, the Melanesians used stone, wood, and shell tools, without knowledge of metallurgy or even weaving. The Melanesian cultures were generally violent3 with everpresent tribal warfare and cannibalism.4

Due to the geographic separation of tribes, New Guinea became the most linguistically diverse country in the world, with over 800 distinct languages. Pidgin English was often the only way for tribes to communicate, and is now one of the official languages of New Guinea. This language, called Tok Pisin (i.e. "talk pidgin"), is now the most common language in Papua New Guinea, spoken by over two-thirds of the population.5

For the Melanesians, religion was a matter of ritual, rather than a moral framework. It is said that "to the Melanesian, a religion is above all a technology: it is the knowledge of how to bring the community into the correct relation, by rites and spells, with the divinities and spirit-beings and cosmic forces that can make or mar man's this-worldly wealth and well-being." This is important since, as will be seen, the Melanesians expected that the correct ritual would result in the arrival of cargo. Catholic and Protestant missionaries converted the inhabitants to Christianity, largely wiping out traditional religious practices and customs; Melanesia is now over 95% Christian. Christianity played a large role in cargo cults, as will be shown below.

European explorers first reached Melanesia in the 1500s, followed by colonization.6 By the end of the 1800s, control of the island of New Guinea was divided among Germany, Britain, and the Netherlands. Britain passed responsibility to Australia in 1906 and Australia gained the German part of New Guinea in World War I. As for the islands of Vanuatu, the British and French colonized them (under the name New Hebrides) in the 18th century.

The influx of Europeans was highly harmful to the Melanesians. "Native society was severely disrupted by war, by catastrophic epidemics of European diseases, by the introduction of alcohol, by the devastation of generations of warfare, and by the depredations of the labour recruiters."8 People were kidnapped and forced to work as laborers in other countries, a practice called blackbirding. Prime agricultural land was taken by planters to raise crops such as coconuts for export, with natives coerced into working for the planters.9 Up until 1919, employers were free to flog the natives for disobedience; afterward, flogging was technically forbidden but still took place. Colonial administrators jailed natives who stepped out of line.7

Cargo cults before World War II

While the pop-culture cargo cults explains them as a reaction to World War II, cargo cults started years earlier. One anthropologist stated, "Cargo cults long preceded [World War II], continued to occur during the war, and have continued to the present."

The first writings about cargo cult behavior date back to 1919, when it was called the "Vailala Madness":10

The natives were saying that the spirits of their ancestors had appeared to several in the villages and told them that all flour, rice, tobacco, and other trade belonged to the New Guinea people, and that the white man had no right whatever to these goods; in a short time all the white men were to be driven away, and then everything would be in the hands of the natives; a large ship was also shortly to appear bringing back the spirits of their departed relatives with quantities of cargo, and all the villages were to make ready to receive them.

The 1926 book In Unknown New Guinea also describes the Vialala Madness:11

[The leader proclaimed] that the ancestors were coming back in the persons of the white people in the country and that all the things introduced by the white people and the ships that brought them belonged really to their ancestors and themselves. [He claimed that] he himself was King George and his friend was the Governor. Christ had given him this authority and he was in communication with Christ through a hole near his village.

The Melanesians blamed the Europeans for the failure of cargo to arrive. In the 1930s, one story was that because the natives had converted to Christianity, God was sending the ancestors with cargo that was loaded on ships. However, the Europeans were going through the cargo holds and replacing the names on the crates so the cargo was fraudulently delivered to the Europeans instead of the rightful natives.

The Mambu Movement occurred in 1937. Mambu, the movement's prophet, claimed that "the Whites had deceived the natives. The ancestors lived inside a volcano on Manum Island, where they worked hard making goods for their descendants: loin-cloths, socks, metal axes, bush-knives, flashlights, mirrors, red dye, etc., even plank-houses, but the scoundrelly Whites took the cargoes. Now this was to stop. The ancestors themselves would bring the goods in a large ship." To stop this movement, the Government arrested Mambu, exiled him, and imprisoned him for six months in 1938.

To summarize, these early cargo cults believed that ships would bring cargo that rightfully belonged to the natives but had been stolen by the whites. The return of the cargo would be accompanied by the spirits of the ancestors. Moreover, Christianity often played a large role. A significant racial component was present, with natives driving out the whites or becoming white themselves.

Cargo cults in World War II and beyond

World War II caused tremendous social and economic upheavals in Melanesia. Much of Melanesia was occupied by Japan near the beginning of the war and the Japanese treated the inhabitants harshly. The American entry into the war led to heavy conflict in the area such as the arduous New Guinea campaign (1942-1945) and the Solomon Islands campaign. As the Americans and Japanese battled for control of the islands, the inhabitants were caught in the middle. Papua and New Guinea suffered over 15,000 civilian deaths, a shockingly high number for such a small region.12

The impact of the Japanese occupation on cargo cults is usually ignored. One example from 1942 is a cargo belief that the Japanese soldiers were spirits of the dead, who were being sent by Jesus to liberate the people from European rule. The Japanese would bring the cargo by airplane since the Europeans were blocking the delivery of cargo by ship. This would be accompanied by storms and earthquakes, and the natives' skin would change from black to white. The natives were to build storehouses for the cargo and fill the storehouses with food for the ancestors. The leader of this movement, named Tagarab, explained that he had an iron rod that gave him messages about the future. Eventually, the Japanese shot Tagarab, bringing an end to this cargo cult.13

The largest and most enduring cargo cult is the John Frum movement, which started on the island of Tanna around 1941 and continues to the present. According to one story, a mythical person known as John Frum, master of the airplanes, would reveal himself and drive off the whites. He would provide houses, clothes, and food for the people of Tanna. The island of Tanna would flatten as the mountains filled up the valleys and everyone would have perfect health. In other areas, the followers of John Frum believed they "would receive a great quantity of goods, brought by a white steamer which would come from America." Families abandoned the Christian villages and moved to primitive shelters in the interior. They wildly spent much of their money and threw the rest into the sea. The government arrested and deported the leaders, but that failed to stop the movement. The identity of John Frum is unclear; he is sometimes said to be a white American while in other cases natives have claimed to be John Frum.14

The cargo cult of Kainantu17 arose around 1945 when a "spirit wind" caused people in the area to shiver and shake. Villages built large "cargo houses" and put stones, wood, and insect-marked leaves inside, representing European goods, rifles, and paper letters respectively. They killed pigs and anointed the objects, the house, and themselves with blood. The cargo house was to receive the visiting European spirit of the dead who would fill the house with goods. This cargo cult continued for about 5 years, diminishing as people became disillusioned by the failure of the goods to arrive.

The name "Cargo Cult" was first used in print in 1945, just after the end of World War II.15 The article blamed the problems on the teachings of missionaries, with the problems "accentuated a hundredfold" by World War II.

Stemming directly from religious teaching of equality, and its resulting sense of injustice, is what is generally known as “Vailala Madness,” or “Cargo Cult.” "In all cases the "Madness" takes the same form: A native, infected with the disorder, states that he has been visited by a relative long dead, who stated that a great number of ships loaded with "cargo" had been sent by the ancestor of the native for the benefit of the natives of a particular village or area. But the white man, being very cunning, knows how to intercept these ships and takes the "cargo" for his own use... Livestock has been destroyed, and gardens neglected in the expectation of the magic cargo arriving. The natives infected by the "Madness" sank into indolence and apathy regarding common hygiene."

In a 1946 episode, agents of the Australian government found a group of New Guinea highlanders who believed that the arrival of the whites signaled that the end of the world was at hand. The highlanders butchered all their pigs in the expectation that "Great Pigs" would appear from the sky in three days. At this time, the residents would exchange their black skin for white skin. They created mock radio antennas of bamboo and rope to receive news of the millennium.16

The New York Times described Cargo Cults in 1948 as "the belief that a convoy of cargo ships is on its way, laden with the fruits of the modern world, to outfit the leaf huts of the natives." The occupants of the British Solomon Islands were building warehouses along the beaches to hold these goods. Natives marched into a US Army camp, presented $3000 in US money, and asked the Army to drive out the British.

A 1951 paper described cargo cults: "The insistence that a 'cargo' of European goods is to be sent by the ancestors or deceased spirits; this may or may not be part of a general reaction against Europeans, with an overtly expressed desire to be free from alien domination. Usually the underlying theme is a belief that all trade goods were sent by ancestors or spirits as gifts for their descendants, but have been misappropriated on the way by Europeans."17

In 1959, The New York Times wrote about cargo cults: "Rare Disease and Strange Cult Disturb New Guinea Territory; Fatal Laughing Sickness Is Under Study by Medical Experts—Prophets Stir Delusions of Food Arrivals". The article states that "large native groups had been infected with the idea that they could expect the arrival of spirit ships carrying large supplies of food. In false anticipation of the arrival of the 'cargoes', 5000 to 7000 native have been known to consume their entire food reserve and create a famine." As for "laughing sickness", this is now known to be a prion disease transmitted by eating human brains. In some communities, this disease, also called Kuru, caused 50% of all deaths.

A detailed 1959 article in Scientific American, "Cargo Cults", described many different cargo cults.16 It lists various features of cargo cults, such as the return of the dead, skin color switching from black to white, threats against white rule, and belief in a coming messiah. The article finds a central theme in cargo cults: "The world is about to end in a terrible cataclysm. Thereafter God, the ancestors or some local culture hero will appear and inaugurate a blissful paradise on earth. Death, old age, illness and evil will be unknown. The riches of the white man will accrue to the Melanesians."

In 1960, the celebrated naturalist David Attenborough created a documentary The People of Paradise: Cargo Cult.18 Attenborough travels through the island of Tanna and encounters many artifacts of the John Frum cult, such as symbolic gates and crosses, painted brilliant scarlet and decorated with objects such as a shaving brush, a winged rat, and a small carved airplane. Attenborough interviews a cult leader who claims to have talked with the mythical John Frum, said to be a white American. The leader remains in communication with John Frum through a tall pole said to be a radio mast, and an unseen radio. (The "radio" consisted of an old woman with electrical wire wrapper around her waist, who would speak gibberish in a trance.)

In 1963, famed anthropologist Margaret Mead brought cargo cults to the general public, writing Where Americans are Gods: The Strange Story of the Cargo Cults in the mass-market newspaper supplement Family Weekly. In just over a page, this article describes the history of cargo cults before, during, and after World War II.19 One cult sat around a table with vases of colorful flowers on them. Another cult threw away their money. Another cult watched for ships from hilltops, expecting John Frum to bring a fleet of ships bearing cargo from the land of the dead.

One of the strangest cargo cults was a group of 2000 people on New Hanover Island, "collecting money to buy President Johnson of the United States [who] would arrive with other Americans on the liner Queen Mary and helicopters next Tuesday." The islanders raised $2000, expecting American cargo to follow the president. Seeing the name Johnson on outboard motors confirmed their belief that President Johnson was personally sending cargo.20

A 1971 article in Time Magazine22 described how tribesmen brought US Army concrete survey markers down from a mountaintop while reciting the Roman Catholic rosary, dropping the heavy markers outside the Australian government office. They expected that "a fleet of 500 jet transports would disgorge thousands of sympathetic Americans bearing crates of knives, steel axes, rifles, mirrors and other wonders." Time magazine explained the “cargo cult” as "a conviction that if only the dark-skinned people can hit on the magic formula, they can, without working, acquire all the wealth and possessions that seem concentrated in the white world... They believe that everything has a deity who has to be contacted through ritual and who only then will deliver the cargo." Cult leaders tried "to duplicate the white man’s magic. They hacked airstrips in the rain forest, but no planes came. They built structures that look like white men’s banks, but no money materialized."21

National Geographic, in an article Head-hunters in Today's World (1972), mentioned a cargo-cult landing field with a replica of a radio aerial, created by villagers who hoped that it would attract airplanes bearing gifts. It also described a cult leader in South Papua who claimed to obtain airplanes and cans of food from a hole in the ground. If the people believed in him, their skins would turn white and he would lead them to freedom.

These sources and many others23 illustrate that cargo cults do not fit a simple story. Instead, cargo cults are extremely varied, happening across thousands of miles and many decades. The lack of common features between cargo cults leads some anthropologists to reject the idea of cargo cults as a meaningful term.24 In any case, most historical cargo cults have very little in common with the pop-culture description of a cargo cult.

Cargo beliefs were inspired by Christianity

Cargo cult beliefs are closely tied to Christianity, a factor that is ignored in pop-culture descriptions of cargo cults. Beginning in the mid-1800s, Christian missionaries set up churches in New Guinea to convert the inhabitants. As a result, cargo cults incorporated Christian ideas, but in very confusing ways. At first, the natives believed that missionaries had come to reveal the ritual secrets and restore the cargo. By enthusiastically joining the church, singing the hymns, and following the church's rituals, the people would be blessed by God, who would give them the cargo. This belief was common in the 1920s and 1930s, but as the years went on and the people didn't receive the cargo, they theorized that the missionaries had removed the first pages of the Bible to hide the cargo secrets.

A typical belief was that God created Adam and Eve in Paradise, "giving them cargo: tinned meat, steel tools, rice in bags, tobacco in tins, and matches, but not cotton clothing." When Adam and Eve offended God by having sexual intercourse, God threw them out of Paradise and took their cargo. Eventually, God sent the Flood but Noah was saved in a steamship and God gave back the cargo. Noah's son Ham offended God, so God took the cargo away from Ham and sent him to New Guinea, where he became the ancestor of the natives.

Other natives believed that God lived in Heaven, which was in the clouds and reachable by ladder from Sydney, Australia (source). God, along with the ancestors, created cargo in Heaven—"tinned meat, bags of rice, steel tools, cotton cloth, tinned tobacco, and a machine for making electric light"—which would be flown from Sydney and delivered to the natives, who thus needed to clear an airstrip (source).25

Another common belief was that symbolic radios could be used to communicate with Jesus. For instance, a Markham Valley cargo group in 1943 created large radio houses so they could be informed of the imminent Coming of Jesus, at which point the natives would expel the whites (source). The "radio" consisted of bamboo cylinders connected to a rope "aerial" strung between two poles. The houses contained a pole with rungs so the natives could climb to Jesus along with cane "flashlights" to see Jesus.

Mock radio antennas are also discussed in a 1943 report26 from a wartime patrol that found a bamboo "wireless house", 42 feet in diameter. It had two long poles outside and with an "aerial" of rope between them, connected to the "radio" inside, a bamboo cylinder. Villagers explained that the "radio" was to receive messages of the return of Jesus, who would provide weapons for the overthrow of white rule. The villagers constructed ladders outside the house so they could climb up to the Christian God after death. They would shed their skin like a snake, getting a new white skin, and then they would receive the "boats and white men's clothing, goods, etc."

Mondo Cane and the creation of the pop-culture cargo cult

As described above, cargo cults expected the cargo to arrive by ships much more often than airplanes. So why do pop-culture cargo cults have detailed descriptions of runways, airplanes, wooden headphones, and bamboo control towers?27 My hypothesis is that it came from a 1962 movie called Mondo Cane. This film was the first "shockumentary", showing extreme and shocking scenes from around the world. Although the film was highly controversial, it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival and was a box-office success.

The film made extensive use of New Guinea with multiple scandalous segments, such as a group of "love-struck" topless women chasing men,29 a woman breastfeeding a pig, and women in cages being fattened for marriage. The last segment in the movie showed "the cult of the cargo plane": natives forlornly watching planes at the airport, followed by scenes of a bamboo airplane sitting on a mountaintop "runway" along with bamboo control towers. The natives waited all day and then lit torches to illuminate the runway at nightfall. These scenes are very similar to the pop-culture descriptions of cargo cults so I suspect this movie is the source.

The film claims that all the scenes "are true and taken only from life", but many of the scenes are said to be staged. Since the cargo cult scenes are very different from anthropological reports and much more dramatic, I think they were also staged and exaggerated.28 It is known that the makers of Mondo Cane paid the Melanesian natives generously for the filming (source, source).

Did Feynman get his cargo cult ideas from Mondo Cane? It may seem implausible since the movie was released over a decade earlier. However, the movie became a cult classic, was periodically shown in theaters, and influenced academics.30 In particular, Mondo Cane showed at the famed Cameo theater in downtown Los Angeles on April 3, 1974, two months before Feynman's commencement speech. Mondo Cane seems like the type of offbeat movie that Feynman would see and the theater was just 11 miles from Caltech. While I can't prove that Feynman went to the showing, his description of a cargo cult strongly resembles the movie.31

Fake cargo-cult photos fill the internet

Fakes and hoaxes make researching cargo cults online difficult. There are numerous photos online of cargo cults, but many of these photos are completely made up. For instance, the photo below has illustrated cargo cults for articles such as Cargo Cult, UX personas are useless, A word on cargo cults, The UK Integrated Review and security sector innovation, and Don't be a cargo cult. However, this photo is from a Japanese straw festival and has nothing to do with cargo cults.

Another example is the photo below, supposedly an antenna created by a cargo cult. However, it is actually a replica of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope, built in 2007 by a British farmer from six tons of straw (details). The farmer's replica ended up erroneously illustrating Cargo Cult Politics, The Cargo Cult & Beliefs, The Cargo Cult, Cargo Cults of the South Pacific, and Cargo Cult, among others.32

Other articles illustrate cargo cults with the aircraft below, suspiciously sleek and well-constructed. However, the photo actually shows a wooden wind tunnel model of the Buran spacecraft, abandoned at a Russian airfield as described in this article. Some uses of the photo are Are you guilty of “cargo cult” thinking without even knowing it? and The Cargo Cult of Wealth.

Many cargo cult articles use one of the photo below. I tracked them down to the 1970 movie "Chariots of the Gods" (link), a dubious documentary claiming that aliens have visited Earth throughout history. The segment on cargo cults is similar to Mondo Cane with cultists surrounding a mock plane on a mountaintop, lighting fires along the runway. However, it is clearly faked, probably in Africa: the people don't look like Pacific Islanders and are wearing wigs. One participant wears leopard skin (leopards don't live in the South Pacific). The vegetation is another giveaway: the plants are from Africa, not the South Pacific.33

The point is that most of the images that illustrate cargo cults online are fake or wrong. Most internet photos and information about cargo cults have just been copied from page to page. (And now we have AI-generated cargo cult photos.) If a photo doesn't have a clear source (including who, when, and where), don't believe it.

Conclusions

The cargo cult metaphor should be avoided for three reasons. First, the metaphor is essentially meaningless and heavily overused. The influential "Jargon File" defined cargo-cult programming as "A style of (incompetent) programming dominated by ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose."34 Note that the metaphor in cargo-cult programming is the opposite of the metaphor in cargo-cult science: Feyman's cargo-cult science has no chance of working, while cargo-cult programming works but isn't understood. Moreover, both metaphors differ from the cargo-cult metaphor in other contexts, referring to the expectation of receiving valuables without working.35

The popular site Hacker News is an example of how "cargo cult" can be applied to anything: agile programming, artificial intelligence, cleaning your desk. Go, hatred of Perl, key rotation, layoffs, MBA programs, microservices, new drugs, quantum computing, static linking, test-driven development, and updating the copyright year are just a few things that are called "cargo cult".36 At this point, cargo cult is simply a lazy, meaningless attack.

The second problem with "cargo cult" is that the pop-culture description of cargo cults is historically inaccurate. Actual cargo cults are much more complex and include a much wider (and stranger) variety of behaviors. Cargo cults started before World War II and involve ships more often than airplanes. Cargo cults mix aspects of paganism and Christianity, often with apocalyptic ideas of the end of the current era, the overthrow of white rule, and the return of dead ancestors. The pop-culture description discards all this complexity, replacing it with a myth.

Finally, the cargo cult metaphor turns decades of harmful colonialism into a humorous anecdote. Feynman's description of cargo cults strips out the moral complexity: US soldiers show up with their cargo and planes, the indigenous residents amusingly misunderstand the situation, and everyone carries on. However, cargo cults really were a response to decades of colonial mistreatment, exploitation, and cultural destruction. Moreover, cargo cults were often harmful: expecting a bounty of cargo, villagers would throw away their money, kill their pigs, and stop tending their crops, resulting in famine. The pop-culture cargo cult erases the decades of colonial oppression, along with the cultural upheaval and deaths from World War II. Melanesians deserve to be more than the punch line in a cargo cult story.

Thus, it's time to move beyond the cargo cult metaphor.

Update: well, this sparked much more discussion on Hacker News than I expected. To answer some questions: Am I better or more virtuous than other people? No. Are you a bad person if you use the cargo cult metaphor? No. Is "cargo cult" one of many Hacker News comments that I'm tired of seeing? Yes (details). Am I criticizing Feynman? No. Do the Melanesians care about this? Probably not. Did I put way too much research into this? Yes. Is criticizing colonialism in the early 20th century woke? I have no response to that.

Notes and references

Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, establishing a long-running brand of high-performance processors.1 The Pentium includes a floating-point unit that can rapidly compute functions such as sines, cosines, logarithms, and exponentials. But how does the Pentium compute these functions? Earlier Intel chips used binary algorithms called CORDIC, but the Pentium switched to polynomials to approximate these transcendental functions much faster. The polynomials have carefully-optimized coefficients that are stored in a special ROM inside the chip's floating-point unit. Even though the Pentium is a complex chip with 3.1 million transistors, it is possible to see these transistors under a microscope and read out these constants. The first part of this post discusses how the floating point constant ROM is implemented in hardware. The second part explains how the Pentium uses these constants to evaluate sin, log, and other functions.

The photo below shows the Pentium's thumbnail-sized silicon die under a microscope. I've labeled the main functional blocks; the floating-point unit is in the lower right. The constant ROM (highlighted) is at the bottom of the floating-point unit. Above the floating-point unit, the microcode ROM holds micro-instructions, the individual steps for complex instructions. To execute an instruction such as sine, the microcode ROM directs the floating-point unit through dozens of steps to compute the approximation polynomial using constants from the constant ROM.

Finding pi in the constant ROM

In binary, pi is 11.00100100001111110... but what does this mean? To interpret this, the value 11 to the left of the binary point is simply 3 in binary. (The "binary point" is the same as a decimal point, except for binary.) The digits to the right of the binary point have the values 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, and so forth. Thus, the binary value `11.001001000011... corresponds to 3 + 1/8 + 1/64 + 1/4096 + 1/8192 + ..., which matches the decimal value of pi. Since pi is irrational, the bit sequence is infinite and non-repeating; the value in the ROM is truncated to 67 bits and stored as a floating point number.

A floating point number is represented by two parts: the exponent and the significand. Floating point numbers include very large numbers such as 6.02×10²³ and very small numbers such as 1.055×10⁻³⁴. In decimal, 6.02×10²³ has a significand (or mantissa) of 6.02, multiplied by a power of 10 with an exponent of 23. In binary, a floating point number is represented similarly, with a significand and exponent, except the significand is multiplied by a power of 2 rather than 10. For example, pi is represented in floating point as 1.1001001...×2¹.

The diagram below shows how pi is encoded in the Pentium chip. Zooming in shows the constant ROM. Zooming in on a small part of the ROM shows the rows of transistors that store the constants. The arrows point to the transistors representing the bit sequence 11001001, where a 0 bit is represented by a transistor (vertical white line) and a 1 bit is represented by no transistor (solid dark silicon). Each magnified black rectangle at the bottom has two potential transistors, storing two bits. The key point is that by looking at the pattern of stripes, we can determine the pattern of transistors and thus the value of each constant, pi in this case.

The bits are spread out because each row of the ROM holds eight interleaved constants to improve the layout. Above the ROM bits, multiplexer circuitry selects the desired constant from the eight in the activated row. In other words, by selecting a row and then one of the eight constants in the row, one of the 304 constants in the ROM is accessed. The ROM stores many more digits of pi than shown here; the diagram shows 8 of the 67 significand bits.

Implementation of the constant ROM

The ROM is built from MOS (metal-oxide-semiconductor) transistors, the transistors used in all modern computers. The diagram below shows the structure of an MOS transistor. An integrated circuit is constructed from a silicon substrate. Regions of the silicon are doped with impurities to create "diffusion" regions with desired electrical properties. The transistor can be viewed as a switch, allowing current to flow between two diffusion regions called the source and drain. The transistor is controlled by the gate, made of a special type of silicon called polysilicon. Applying voltage to the gate lets current flow between the source and drain, which is otherwise blocked. Most computers use two types of MOS transistors: NMOS and PMOS. The two types have similar construction but reverse the doping; NMOS uses n-type diffusion regions as shown below, while PMOS uses p-type diffusion regions. Since the two types are complementary (C), circuits built with the two types of transistors are called CMOS.

The image below shows how a transistor in the ROM looks under the microscope. The pinkish regions are the doped silicon that forms the transistor's source and drain. The vertical white line is the polysilicon that forms the transistor's gate. For this photo, I removed the chip's three layers of metal, leaving just the underlying silicon and the polysilicon. The circles in the source and drain are tungsten contacts that connect the silicon to the metal layer above.

The diagram below shows eight bits of storage. Each of the four pink silicon rectangles has two potential transistors. If a polysilicon gate crosses the silicon, a transistor is formed; otherwise there is no transistor. When a select line (horizontal polysilicon) is energized, it will turn on all the transistors in that row. If a transistor is present, the corresponding ROM bit is 0 because the transistor will pull the output line to ground. If a transistor is absent, the ROM bit is 1. Thus, the pattern of transistors determines the data stored in the ROM. The ROM holds 26144 bits (304 words of 86 bits) so it has 26144 potential transistors.

The photo below shows the bottom layer of metal (M1): vertical metal wires that provide the ROM outputs and supply ground to the ROM. (These wires are represented by gray lines in the schematic above.) The polysilicon transistors (or gaps as appropriate) are barely visible between the metal lines. Most of the small circles are tungsten contacts to the silicon or polysilicon; compare with the photo above. Other circles are tungsten vias to the metal layer on top (M2), horizontal wiring that I removed for this photo. The smaller metal "tabs" act as jumpers between the horizontal metal select lines in M2 and the polysilicon select lines. The top metal layer (M3, not visible) has thicker vertical wiring for the chip's primary distribution power and ground. Thus, the three metal layers alternate between horizontal and vertical wiring, with vias between the layers.

The ROM is implemented as two grids of cells (below): one to hold exponents and one to hold significands, as shown below. The exponent grid (on the left) has 38 rows and 144 columns of transistors, while the significand grid (on the right) has 38 rows and 544 columns. To make the layout work better, each row holds eight different constants; the bits are interleaved so the ROM holds the first bit of eight constants, then the second bit of eight constants, and so forth. Thus, with 38 rows, the ROM holds 304 constants; each constant has 18 bits in the exponent part and 68 bits in the significand section.

The exponent part of each constant consists of 18 bits: a 17-bit exponent and one bit for the sign of the significand and thus the constant. There is no sign bit for the exponent because the exponent is stored with 65535 (0x0ffff) added to it, avoiding negative values. The 68-bit significand entry in the ROM consists of a mysterious flag bit2 followed by the 67-bit significand; the first bit of the significand is the integer part and the remainder is the fractional part.3 The complete contents of the ROM are in the appendix at the bottom of this post.

To select a particular constant, the "row select" circuitry between the two sections activates one of the 38 rows. That row provides 144+544 bits to the selection circuitry above the ROM. This circuitry has 86 multiplexers; each multiplexer selects one bit out of the group of 8, selecting the desired constant. The significand bits flow into the floating-point unit datapath circuitry above the ROM. The exponent circuitry, however, is in the upper-left corner of the floating-point unit, a considerable distance from the ROM, so the exponent bits travel through a bus to the exponent circuitry.

The row select circuitry consists of gates to decode the row number, along with high-current drivers to energize the selected row in the ROM. The photo below shows a closeup of two row driver circuits, next to some ROM cells. At the left, PMOS and NMOS transistors implement a gate to select the row. Next, larger NMOS and PMOS transistors form part of the driver. The large square structures are bipolar NPN transistors; the Pentium is unusual because it uses both bipolar transistors and CMOS, a technique called BiCMOS.4 Each driver occupies as much height as four rows of the ROM, so there are four drivers arranged horizontally; only one is visible in the photo.

Structure of the floating-point unit

The floating-point unit is structured with data flowing vertically through horizontal functional units, as shown below. The functional units—adders, shifters, registers, and comparators—are arranged in rows. This collection of functional units with data flowing through them is called the datapath.5

Each functional unit is constructed from cells, one per bit, with the high-order bit on the left and the low-order bit on the right. Each cell has the same width—38.5 µm—so the functional units can be connected like Lego blocks snapping together, minimizing the wiring. The height of a functional unit varies as needed, depending on the complexity of the circuit. Functional units typically have 69 bits, but some are wider, so the edges of the datapath circuitry are ragged.

This cell-based construction explains why the ROM has eight constants per row. A ROM bit requires a single transistor, which is much narrower than, say, an adder. Thus, putting one bit in each 38.5 µm cell would waste most of the space. Compacting the ROM bits into a narrow block would also be inefficient, requiring diagonal wiring to connect each ROM bit to the corresponding datapath bit. By putting eight bits for eight different constants into each cell, the width of a ROM cell matches the rest of the datapath and the alignment of bits is preserved. Thus, the layout of the ROM in silicon is dense, efficient, and matches the width of the rest of the floating-point unit.

Polynomial approximation: don't use a Taylor series

Now I'll move from the hardware to the constants. If you look at the constant ROM contents in the appendix, you may notice that many constants are close to reciprocals or reciprocal factorials, but don't quite match. For instance, one constant is 0.1111111089, which is close to 1/9, but visibly wrong. Another constant is almost 1/13! (factorial) but wrong by 0.1%. What's going on?

The Pentium uses polynomials to approximate transcendental functions (sine, cosine, tangent, arctangent, and base-2 powers and logarithms). Intel's earlier floating-point units, from the 8087 to the 486, used an algorithm called CORDIC that generated results a bit at a time. However, the Pentium takes advantage of its fast multiplier and larger ROM and uses polynomials instead, computing results two to three times faster than the 486 algorithm.

You may recall from calculus that a Taylor series polynomial approximates a function near a point (typically 0). For example, the equation below gives the Taylor series for sine.

Using the five terms shown above generates a function that looks indistinguishable from sine in the graph below. However, it turns out that this approximation has too much error to be useful.

The problem is that a Taylor series is very accurate near 0, but the error soars near the edges of the argument range, as shown in the graph on the left below. When implementing a function, we want the function to be accurate everywhere, not just close to 0, so the Taylor series isn't good enough.

One improvement is called range reduction: shrinking the argument to a smaller range so you're in the accurate flat part.6 The graph on the right looks at the Taylor series over the smaller range [-1/32, 1/32]. This decreases the error dramatically, by about 22 orders of magnitude (note the scale change). However, the error still shoots up at the edges of the range in exactly the same way. No matter how much you reduce the range, there is almost no error in the middle, but the edges have a lot of error.7

How can we get rid of the error near the edges? The trick is to tweak the coefficients of the Taylor series in a special way that will increase the error in the middle, but decrease the error at the edges by much more. Since we want to minimize the maximum error across the range (called minimax), this tradeoff is beneficial. Specifically, the coefficients can be optimized by a process called the Remez algorithm.8 As shown below, changing the coefficients by less than 1% dramatically improves the accuracy. The optimized function (blue) has much lower error over the full range, so it is a much better approximation than the Taylor series (orange).

To summarize, a Taylor series is useful in calculus, but shouldn't be used to approximate a function. You get a much better approximation by modifying the coefficients very slightly with the Remez algorithm. This explains why the coefficients in the ROM almost, but not quite, match a Taylor series.

Arctan

I'll now look at the Pentium's constants for different transcendental functions. The constant ROM contains coefficients for two arctan polynomials, one for single precision and one for double precision. These polynomials almost match the Taylor series, but have been modified for accuracy. The ROM also holds the values for arctan(1/32) through arctan(32/32); the range reduction process uses these constants with a trig identity to reduce the argument range to [-1/64, 1/64].9 You can see the arctan constants in the Appendix.

The graph below shows the error for the Pentium's arctan polynomial (blue) versus the Taylor series of the same length (orange). The Pentium's polynomial is superior due to the Remez optimization. Although the Taylor series polynomial is much flatter in the middle, the error soars near the boundary. The Pentium's polynomial wiggles more but it maintains a low error across the whole range. The error in the Pentium polynomial blows up outside this range, but that doesn't matter.

Trig functions

Sine and cosine each have two polynomial implementations, one with 4 terms in the ROM and one with 6 terms in the ROM. (Note that coefficients of 1 are not stored in the ROM.) The constant table also holds 16 constants such as sin(36/64) and cos(18/64) that are used for argument range reduction.10 The Pentium computes tangent by dividing the sine by the cosine. I'm not showing a graph because the Pentium's error came out worse than the Taylor series, so either I have an error in a coefficient or I'm doing something wrong.

Exponential

The Pentium has an instruction to compute a power of two.11 There are two sets of polynomial coefficients for exponential, one with 6 terms in the ROM and one with 11 terms in the ROM. Curiously, the polynomials in the ROM compute e^x, not 2^x. Thus, the Pentium must scale the argument by ln(2), a constant that is in the ROM. The error graph below shows the advantage of the Pentium's polynomial over the Taylor series polynomial.

The polynomial handles the narrow argument range [-1/128, 1/128]. Observe that when computing a power of 2 in binary, exponentiating the integer part of the argument is trivial, since it becomes the result's exponent. Thus, the function only needs to handle the range [1, 2]. For range reduction, the constant ROM holds 64 values of the form 2^n/128-1. To reduce the range from [1, 2] to [-1/128, 1/128], the closest n/128 is subtracted from the argument and then the result is multiplied by the corresponding constant in the ROM. The constants are spaced irregularly, presumably for accuracy; some are in steps of 4/128 and others are in steps of 2/128.

Logarithm

The Pentium can compute base-2 logarithms.12 The coefficients define polynomials for the hyperbolic arctan, which is closely related to log. See the comments for details. The ROM also has 64 constants for range reduction: log₂(1+n/64) for odd n from 1 to 63. The unusual feature of these constants is that each constant is split into two pieces to increase the bits of accuracy: the top part has 40 bits of accuracy and the bottom part has 67 bits of accuracy, providing a 107-bit constant in total. The extra bits are required because logarithms are hard to compute accurately.

Other constants

The x87 floating-point instruction set provides direct access to a handful of constants—0, 1, pi, log₂(10), log₂(e), log₁₀(2), and log_e(2)—so these constants are stored in the ROM. (These logs are useful for changing the base for logs and exponentials.) The ROM holds other constants for internal use by the floating-point unit such as -1, 2, 7/8, 9/8, pi/2, pi/4, and 2log₂(e). The ROM also holds bitmasks for extracting part of a word, for instance accessing 4-bit BCD digits in a word. Although I can interpret most of the values, there are a few mysteries such as a mask with the inscrutable value 0x3e8287c. The ROM has 34 unused entries at the end; these entries hold words that include the descriptive hex value 0xbad or perhaps 0xbadfc for "bad float constant".

How I examined the ROM

To analyze the Pentium, I removed the metal and oxide layers with various chemicals (sulfuric acid, phosphoric acid, Whink). (I later discovered that simply sanding the die works surprisingly well.) Next, I took many photos of the ROM with a microscope. The feature size of this Pentium is 800 nm, just slightly larger than visible light (380-700 nm). Thus, the die can be examined under an optical microscope, but it is getting close to the limits. To determine the ROM contents, I tediously went through the ROM images, examining each of the 26144 bits and marking each transistor. After figuring out the ROM format, I wrote programs to combine simple functions in many different combinations to determine the mathematical expression such as arctan(19/32) or log₂(10). Because the polynomial constants are optimized and my ROM data has bit errors, my program needed checks for inexact matches, both numerically and bitwise. Finally, I had to determine how the constants would be used in algorithms.

Conclusions

By examining the Pentium's floating-point ROM under a microscope, it is possible to extract the 304 constants stored in the ROM. I was able to determine the meaning of most of these constants and deduce some of the floating-point algorithms used by the Pentium. These constants illustrate how polynomials can efficiently compute transcendental functions. Although Taylor series polynomials are well known, they are surprisingly inaccurate and should be avoided. Minor changes to the coefficients through the Remez algorithm, however, yield much better polynomials.

In a previous article, I examined the floating-point constants stored in the 8087 coprocessor. The Pentium has 304 constants in the Pentium, compared to just 42 in the 8087, supporting more efficient algorithms. Moreover, the 8087 was an external floating-point unit, while the Pentium's floating-point unit is part of the processor. The changes between the 8087 (1980, 65,000 transistors) and the Pentium (1993, 3.1 million transistors) are due to the exponential improvements in transistor count, as described by Moore's Law.

I plan to write more about the Pentium so follow me on Bluesky (@righto.com) or RSS for updates. (I'm no longer on Twitter.) I've also written about the Pentium division bug and the Pentium Navajo rug. Thanks to CuriousMarc for microscope help. Thanks to lifthrasiir and Alexia for identifying some constants.

Appendix: The constant ROM

The table below lists the 304 constants in the Pentium's floating-point ROM. The first four columns show the values stored in the ROM: the exponent, the sign bit, the flag bit, and the significand. To avoid negative exponents, exponents are stored with the constant 0x0ffff added. For example, the value 0x0fffe represents an exponent of -1, while 0x10000 represents an exponent of 1. The constant's approximate decimal value is in the "value" column.

Special-purpose values are colored. Specifically, "normal" numbers are in black. Constants with an exponent of all 0's are in blue, constants with an exponent of all 1's are in red, constants with an unusually large or small exponent are in green; these appear to be bitmasks rather than numbers. Unused entries are in gray. Inexact constants (due to Remez optimization) are represented with the approximation symbol "≈".

This information is from my reverse engineering, so there will be a few errors.

Notes and references

In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. The Pentium had many improvements over the previous processor, the Intel 486, including a faster floating-point division algorithm. A year later, Professor Nicely, a number theory professor, was researching reciprocals of twin prime numbers when he noticed a problem: his Pentium sometimes generated the wrong result when performing floating-point division. Intel considered this "an extremely minor technical problem", but much to Intel's surprise, the bug became a large media story. After weeks of criticism, mockery, and bad publicity, Intel agreed to replace everyone's faulty Pentium chips, costing the company $475 million.

In this article, I discuss the Pentium's division algorithm, show exactly where the bug is on the Pentium chip, take a close look at the circuitry, and explain what went wrong. In brief, the division algorithm uses a lookup table. In 1994, Intel stated that the cause of the bug was that five entries were omitted from the table due to an error in a script. However, my analysis shows that 16 entries were omitted due to a mathematical mistake in the definition of the lookup table. Five of the missing entries trigger the bug— also called the FDIV bug after the floating-point division instruction "FDIV"—while 11 of the missing entries have no effect.

Although Professor Nicely brought attention to the FDIV bug, he wasn't the first to find it. In May 1994, Intel's internal testing of the Pentium revealed that very rarely, floating-point division was slightly inaccurate.1 Since only one in 9 billion values caused the problem, Intel's view was that the problem was trivial: "This doesn't even qualify as an errata." Nonetheless, Intel quietly revised the Pentium circuitry to fix the problem.

A few months later, in October, Nicely noticed erroneous results in his prime number computations.2 He soon determined that 1/824633702441 was wrong on three different Pentium computers, but his older computers gave the right answer. He called Intel tech support but was brushed off, so Nicely emailed a dozen computer magazines and individuals about the bug. One of the recipients was Andrew Schulman, author of "Undocumented DOS". He forwarded the email to Richard Smith, cofounder of a DOS software tools company. Smith posted the email on a Compuserve forum, a 1990s version of social media.

A reporter for the journal Electronic Engineering Times spotted the Compuserve post and wrote about the Pentium bug in the November 7 issue: Intel fixes a Pentium FPU glitch. In the article, Intel explained that the bug was in a component of the chip called a PLA (Programmable Logic Array) that acted as a lookup table for the division operation. Intel had fixed the bug in the latest Pentiums and would replace faulty processors for concerned customers.3

The problem might have quietly ended here, except that Intel decided to restrict which customers could get a replacement. If a customer couldn't convince an Intel engineer that they needed the accuracy, they couldn't get a fixed Pentium. Users were irate to be stuck with faulty chips so they took their complaints to online groups such as comp.sys.intel. The controversy spilled over into the offline world on November 22 when CNN reported on the bug. Public awareness of the Pentium bug took off as newspapers wrote about the bug and Intel became a punchline on talk shows.4

The situation became intolerable for Intel on December 12 when IBM announced that it was stopping shipments of Pentium computers.5 On December 19, less than two months after Nicely first reported the bug, Intel gave in and announced that it would replace the flawed chips for all customers.6 This recall cost Intel $475 million (over a billion dollars in current dollars).

Meanwhile, engineers and mathematicians were analyzing the bug, including Tim Coe, an engineer who had designed floating-point units.7 Remarkably, by studying the Pentium's bad divisions, Coe reverse-engineered the Pentium's division algorithm and determined why it went wrong. Coe and others wrote papers describing the mathematics behind the Pentium bug.8 But until now, nobody has shown how the bug is implemented in the physical chip itself.

A quick explanation of floating point numbers

At this point, I'll review a few important things about floating point numbers. A binary number can have a fractional part, similar to a decimal number. For instance, the binary number 11.1001 has four digits after the binary point. (The binary point "." is similar to the decimal point, but for a binary number.) The first digit after the binary point represents 1/2, the second represents 1/4, and so forth. Thus, 11.1001 corresponds to 3 + 1/2 + 1/16 = 3.5625. A "fixed point" number such as this can express a fractional value, but its range is limited.

Floating point numbers, on the other hand, include very large numbers such as 6.02×10²³ and very small numbers such as 1.055×10⁻³⁴. In decimal, 6.02×10²³ has a significand (or mantissa) of 6.02, multiplied by a power of 10 with an exponent of 23. In binary, a floating point number is represented similarly, with a significand and exponent, except the significand is multiplied by a power of 2 rather than 10.

Computers have used floating point since the early days of computing, especially for scientific computing. For many years, different computers used incompatible formats for floating point numbers. Eventually, a standard arose when Intel developed the 8087 floating point coprocessor chip for use with the 8086/8088 processor. The characteristics of this chip became a standard (IEEE 754) in 1985.9 Subsequently, most computers, including the Pentium, implemented floating point numbers according to this standard. The result of a basic arithmetic operation is supposed to be accurate up to the last bit of the significand. Unfortunately, division on the Pentium was occasionally much, much worse.

How SRT division works

How does a computer perform division? The straightforward way is similar to grade-school long division, except in binary. That approach was used in the Intel 486 and earlier processors, but the process is slow, taking one clock cycle for each bit of the quotient. The Pentium uses a different approach called SRT,10 performing division in base four. Thus, SRT generates two bits of the quotient per step, rather than one, so division is twice as fast. I'll explain SRT in a hand-waving manner with a base-10 example; rigorous explanations are available elsewhere.

The diagram below shows base-10 long division, with the important parts named. The dividend is divided by the divisor, yielding the quotient. In each step of the long division algorithm, you generate one more digit of the quotient. Then you multiply the divisor (1535) by the quotient digit (2) and subtract this from the dividend, leaving a partial remainder. You multiply the partial remainder by 10 and then repeat the process, generating a quotient digit and partial remainder at each step. The diagram below stops after two quotient digits, but you can keep going to get as much accuracy as desired.

Note that division is more difficult than multiplication since there is no easy way to determine each quotient digit. You have to estimate a quotient digit, multiply it by the divisor, and then check if the quotient digit is correct. For example, you have to check carefully to see if 1535 goes into 4578 two times or three times.

The SRT algorithm makes it easier to select the quotient digit through an unusual approach: it allows negative digits in the quotient. With this change, the quotient digit does not need to be exact. If you pick a quotient digit that is a bit too large, you can use a negative number for the next digit: this will counteract the too-large digit since the next divisor will be added rather than subtracted.

The example below shows how this works. Suppose you picked 3 instead of 2 as the first quotient digit. Since 3 is too big, the partial remainder is negative (-261). In normal division, you'd need to try again with a different quotient digit. But with SRT, you keep going, using a negative digit (-1) for the quotient digit in the next step. At the end, the quotient with positive and negative digits can be converted to the standard form: 3×10-1 = 29, the same quotient as before.

One nice thing about the SRT algorithm is that since the quotient digit only needs to be close, a lookup table can be used to select the quotient digit. Specifically, the partial remainder and divisor can be truncated to a few digits, making the lookup table a practical size. In this example, you could truncate 1535 and 4578 to 15 and 45, the table says that 15 goes into 45 three times, and you can use 3 as your quotient digit.

Instead of base 10, the Pentium uses the SRT algorithm in base 4: groups of two bits. As a result, division on the Pentium is twice as fast as standard binary division. With base-4 SRT, each quotient digit can be -2, -1, 0, 1, or 2. Multiplying by any of these values is very easy in hardware since multiplying by 2 can be done by a bit shift. Base-4 SRT does not require quotient digits of -3 or 3; this is convenient since multiplying by 3 is somewhat difficult. To summarize, base-4 SRT is twice as fast as regular binary division, but it requires more hardware: a lookup table, circuitry to add or subtract multiples of 1 or 2, and circuitry to convert the quotient to the standard form.

Structure of the Pentium's lookup table

The purpose of the SRT lookup table is to provide the quotient digit. That is, the table takes the partial remainder p and the divisor d as inputs and provides an appropriate quotient digit. The Pentium's lookup table is the cause of the division bug, as was explained in 1994. The table was missing five entries; if the SRT algorithm accesses one of these missing entries, it generates an incorrect result. In this section, I'll discuss the structure of the lookup table and explain what went wrong.

The Pentium's lookup table contains 2048 entries, as shown below. The table has five regions corresponding to the quotient digits +2, +1, 0, -1, and -2. Moreover, the upper and lower regions of the table are unused (due to the mathematics of SRT). The unused entries were filled with 0, which turns out to be very important. In particular, the five red entries need to contain +2 but were erroneously filled with 0.

When the SRT algorithm uses the table, the partial remainder p and the divisor d are inputs. The divisor (scaled to fall between 1 and 2) provides the X coordinate into the table, while the partial remainder (between -8 and 8) provides the Y coordinate. The details of the table coordinates will be important, so I'll go into some detail. To select a cell, the divisor (X-axis) is truncated to a 5-bit binary value 1.dddd. (Since the first digit of the divisor is always 1, it is ignored for the table lookup.) The partial remainder (Y-axis) is truncated to a 7-bit signed binary value pppp.ppp. The 11 bits indexing into the table result in a table with 2¹¹ (2048) entries. The partial remainder is expressed in 2's complement, so values 0000.000 to 0111.111 are non-negative values from 0 to (almost) 8, while values 1000.000 to 1111.111 are negative values from -8 to (almost) 0. (To see the binary coordinates for the table, click on the image and zoom in.)

The lookup table is implemented in a Programmable Logic Array (PLA)

In this section, I'll explain how the lookup table is implemented in hardware in the Pentium. The lookup table has 2048 entries so it could be stored in a ROM with 2048 two-bit outputs.11 (The sign is not explicitly stored in the table because the quotient digit sign is the same as the partial remainder sign.) However, because the table is highly structured (and largely empty), the table can be stored more compactly in a structure called a Programmable Logic Array (PLA).12 By using a PLA, the Pentium stored the table in just 112 rows rather than 2048 rows, saving an enormous amount of space. Even so, the PLA is large enough on the chip that it is visible to the naked eye, if you squint a bit.

The idea of a PLA is to provide a dense and flexible way of implementing arbitrary logic functions. Any Boolean logic function can be expressed as a "sum-of-products", a collection of AND terms (products) that are OR'd together (summed). A PLA has a block of circuitry called the AND plane that generates the desired sum terms. The outputs of the AND plane are fed into a second block, the OR plane, which ORs the terms together. The AND plane and the OR plane are organized as grids. Each gridpoint can either have a transistor or not, defining the logic functions. The point is that by putting the appropriate pattern of transistors in the grids, you can create any function. For the division PLA, there are has 22 inputs (the 11 bits from the divisor and partial remainder indices, along with their complements) and two outputs, as shown below.13

A PLA is more compact than a ROM if the structure of the function allows it to be expressed with a small number of terms.14 One difficulty with a PLA is figuring out how to express the function with the minimum number of terms to make the PLA as small as possible. It turns out that this problem is NP-complete in general. Intel used a program called Espresso to generate compact PLAs using heuristics.15

The diagram below shows the division PLA in the Pentium. The PLA has 120 rows, split into two 60-row parts with support circuitry in the middle.16 The 11 table input bits go into the AND plane drivers in the middle, which produce the 22 inputs to the PLA (each table input and its complement). The outputs from the AND plane transistors go through output buffers and are fed into the OR plane. The outputs from the OR plane go through additional buffers and logic in the center, producing two output bits, indicating a ±1 or ±2 quotient. The image below shows the updated PLA that fixes the bug; the faulty PLA looks similar except the transistor pattern is different. In particular, the updated PLA has 46 unused rows at the bottom while the original, faulty PLA has 8 unused rows.

The image below shows part of the AND plane of the PLA. At each point in the grid, a transistor can be present or absent. The pattern of transistors in a row determines the logic term for that row. The vertical doped silicon lines (green) are connected to ground. The vertical polysilicon lines (red) are driven with the input bit pattern. If a polysilicon line crosses doped silicon, it forms a transistor (orange) that will pull that row to ground when activated.17 A metal line connects all the transistor rows in a row to produce the output; most of the metal has been removed, but some metal lines are visible at the right.

By carefully examining the PLA under a microscope, I extracted the pattern of transistors in the PLA grid. (This was somewhat tedious.) From the transistor pattern, I could determine the equations for each PLA row, and then generate the contents of the lookup table. Note that the transistors in the PLA don't directly map to the table contents (unlike a ROM). Thus, there is no specific place for transistors corresponding to the 5 missing table entries.

The left-hand side of the PLA implements the OR planes (below). The OR plane determines if the row output produces a quotient of 1 or 2. The OR plane is oriented 90° relative to the AND plane: the inputs are horizontal polysilicon lines (red) while the output lines are vertical. As before, a transistor (orange) is formed where polysilicon crosses doped silicon. Curiously, each OR plane has four outputs, even though the PLA itself has two outputs.18

Next, I'll show exactly how the AND plane produces a term. For the division table, the inputs are the 7 partial remainder bits and 4 divisor bits, as explained earlier. I'll call the partial remainder bits p₆p₅p₄p₃.p₂p₁p₀ and the divisor bits 1.d₃d₂d₁d₀. These 11 bits and their complements are fed vertically into the PLA as shown at the top of the diagram below. These lines are polysilicon, so they will form transistor gates, turning on the corresponding transistor when activated. The arrows at the bottom point to nine transistors in the first row. (It's tricky to tell if the polysilicon line passes next to doped silicon or over the silicon, so the transistors aren't always obvious.) Looking at the transistors and their inputs shows that the first term in the PLA is generated by p₀p₁p₂p₃p₄'p₅p₆d₁d₂.

The diagram below is a closeup of the lookup table, showing how this PLA row assigns the value 1 to four table cells (dark blue). You can think of each term of the PLA as pattern-matching to a binary pattern that can include "don't care" values. The first PLA term (above) matches the pattern P=110.1111, D=x11x, where the "don't care" x values can be either 0 or 1. Since one PLA row can implement multiple table cells, the PLA is more efficient than a ROM; the PLA uses 112 rows, while a ROM would require 2048 rows.

Geometrically, you can think of each PLA term (row) as covering a rectangle or rectangles in the table. However, the rectangle can't be arbitrary, but must be aligned on a bit boundary. Note that each "bump" in the table boundary (magenta) requires a separate rectangle and thus a separate PLA row. (This will be important later.)

One PLA row can generate a large rectangle, filling in many table cells at once, if the region happens to be aligned nicely. For instance, the third term in the PLA matches d=xxxx, p=11101xx. This single PLA row efficiently fills in 64 table cells as shown below, replacing the 64 rows that would be required in a ROM.

To summarize, the pattern of transistors in the PLA implements a set of equations, which define the contents of the table, setting the quotient to 1 or 2 as appropriate. Although the table has 2048 entries, the PLA represents the contents in just 112 rows. By carefully examining the transistor pattern, I determined the table contents in a faulty Pentium and a fixed Pentium.

The mathematical bounds of the lookup table

As shown earlier, the lookup table has regions corresponding to quotient digits of +2, +1, 0, -1, and -2. These regions have irregular, slanted shapes, defined by mathematical bounds. In this section, I'll explain these mathematical bounds since they are critical to understanding how the Pentium bug occurred.

The essential step of the division algorithm is to divide the partial remainder p by the divisor d to get the quotient digit. The following diagram shows how p/d determines the quotient digit. The ratio p/d will define a point on the line at the top. (The point will be in the range [-8/3, 8/3] for mathematical reasons.) The point will fall into one of the five lines below, defining the quotient digit q. However, the five quotient regions overlap; if p/d is in one of the green segments, there are two possible quotient digits. The next part of the diagram illustrates how subtracting q*d from the partial remainder p shifts p/d into the middle, between -2/3 and 2/3. Finally, the result is multiplied by 4 (shifted left by two bits), expanding19 the interval back to [-8/3, 8/3], which is the same size as the original interval. The 8/3 bound may seem arbitrary, but the motivation is that it ensures that the new interval is the same size as the original interval, so the process can be repeated. (The bounds are all thirds for algebraic reasons; the value 3 comes from base 4 minus 1.20)

Note that the SRT algorithm has some redundancy, but cannot handle q values that are "too wrong". Specifically, if p/d is in a green region, then either of two q values can be selected. However, the algorithm cannot recover from a bad q value in general. The relevant case is that if q is supposed to be 2 but 0 is selected, the next partial remainder will be outside the interval and the algorithm can't recover. This is what causes the FDIV bug.

The diagram below shows the structure of the SRT lookup table (also called the P-D table since the axes are p and d). Each bound in the diagram above turns into a line in the table. For instance, the green segment above with p/d between 4/3 and 5/3 turns into a green region in the table below with 4/3 d ≤ p ≤ 5/3 d. These slanted lines show the regions in which a particular quotient digit q can be used.

The lookup table in the Pentium is based on the above table, quantized with a q value in each cell. However, there is one more constraint to discuss.

Carry-save and carry-lookahead adders

The Pentium's division circuitry uses a special circuit to perform addition and subtraction efficiently: the carry-save adder. One consequence of this adder is that each access to the lookup table may go to the cell just below the "right" cell. This is expected and should be fine, but in very rare and complicated circumstances, this behavior causes an access to one of the Pentium's five missing cells, triggering the division bug. In this section, I'll discuss why the division circuitry uses a carry-save adder, how the carry-save adder works, and how the carry-save adder triggers the FDIV bug.

The problem with addition is that carries make addition slow. Consider calculating 99999+1 by hand. You'll start with 9+1=10, then carry the one, generating another carry, which generates another carry, and so forth, until you go through all the digits. Computer addition has the same problem. If you're adding, say, two 64-bit numbers, the low-order bits can generate a carry that then propagates through all 64 bits. The time for the carry signal to go through 64 layers of circuitry is significant and can limit CPU performance. As a result, CPUs use special circuits to make addition faster.

The Pentium's division circuitry uses an unusual adder circuit called a carry-save adder to add (or subtract) the divisor and the partial remainder. A carry-save adder speeds up addition if you are performing a bunch of additions, as happens during division. The idea is that instead of adding a carry to each digit as it happens, you hold onto the carries in a separate word. As a decimal example, 499+222 would be 611 with carries 011; you don't carry the one to the second digit, but hold onto it. The next time you do an addition, you add in the carries you saved previously, and again save any new carries. The advantage of the carry-save adder is that the sum and carry at each digit position can be computed in parallel, which is fast. The disadvantage is that you need to do a slow addition at the end of the sequence of additions to add in the remaining carries to get the final answer. But if you're performing multiple additions (as for division), the carry-save adder is faster overall.

The carry-save adder creates a problem for the lookup table. We need to use the partial remainder as an index into the lookup table. But the carry-save adder splits the partial remainder into two parts: the sum bits and the carry bits. To get the table index, we need to add the sum bits and carry bits together. Since this addition needs to happen for every step of the division, it seems like we're back to using a slow adder and the carry-save adder has just made things worse.

The trick is that we only need 7 bits of the partial remainder for the table index, so we can use a different type of adder—a carry-lookahead adder—that calculates each carry in parallel using brute force logic. The logic in a carry-lookahead adder gets more and more complex for each bit so a carry-lookahead adder is impractical for large words, but it is practical for a 7-bit value.

The photo below shows the carry-lookahead adder used by the divider. Curiously, the adder is an 8-bit adder but only 7 bits are used; perhaps the 8-bit adder was a standard logic block at Intel.21 I'll just give a quick summary of the adder here, and leave the details for another post. At the top, logic gates compute signals in parallel for each of the 8 pairs of inputs: sum, carry generate, and carry propagate. Next, the complex carry-lookahead logic determines in parallel if there will be a carry at each position. Finally, XOR gates apply the carry to each bit. The circuitry in the middle is used for testing; see the footnote.22 At the bottom, the drivers amplify control signals for various parts of the adder and send the PLA output to other parts of the chip.23 By counting the blocks of repeated circuitry, you can see which blocks are 8 bits wide, 11, bits wide, and so forth. The carry-lookahead logic is different for each bit, so there is no repeated structure.

The carry-save and carry-lookahead adders may seem like implementation trivia, but they are a critical part of the FDIV bug because they change the constraints on the table. The cause is that the partial remainder is 64 bits,24 but the adder that computes the table index is 7 bits. Since the rest of the bits are truncated before the sum, the partial remainder sum for the table index can be slightly lower than the real partial remainder. Specifically, the table index can be one cell lower than the correct cell, an offset of 1/8. Recall the earlier diagram with diagonal lines separating the regions. Some (but not all) of these lines must be shifted down by 1/8 to account for the carry-save effect, but Intel made the wrong adjustment, which is the root cause of the FDIV error. (This effect was well-known at the time and mentioned in papers on SRT division, so Intel shouldn't have gotten it wrong.)

An interesting thing about the FDIV bug is how extremely rare it is. With 5 bad table entries out of 2048, you'd expect erroneous divides to be very common. However, for complicated mathematical reasons involving the carry-save adder the missing table entries are almost never encountered: only about 1 in 9 billion random divisions will encounter a problem. To hit a missing table entry, you need an "unlucky" result from the carry-save adder multiple times in a row, making the odds similar to winning the lottery, if the lottery prize were a division error.25

What went wrong in the lookup table

I consider the diagram below to be the "smoking gun" that explains how the FDIV bug happens: the top magenta line should be above the sloping black line, but it crosses the black line repeatedly. The magenta line carefully stays above the gray line, but that's the wrong line. In other words, Intel picked the wrong bounds line when defining the +2 region of the table. In this section, I'll explain why that causes the bug.

The diagram is colored according to the quotient values stored in the Pentium's lookup table: yellow is +2, blue is +1, and white is 0, with magenta lines showing the boundaries between different values. The diagonal black lines are the mathematical constraints on the table, defining the region that must be +2, the region that can be +1 or +2, the region that must be +1, and so forth. For the table to be correct, each cell value in the table must satisfy these constraints. The middle magenta line is valid: it remains between the two black lines (the redundant +1 or +2 region), so all the cells that need to be +1 are +1 and all the cells that need to be +2 are +2, as required. Likewise, the bottom magenta line remains between the black lines. However, the top magenta line is faulty: it must remain above the top black line, but it crosses the black line. The consequence is that some cells that need to be +2 end up holding 0: these are the missing cells that caused the FDIV bug.

Note that the top magenta line stays above the diagonal gray line while following it as closely as possible. If the gray line were the correct line, the table would be perfect. Unfortunately, Intel picked the wrong constraint line for the table's upper bound when the table was generated.26

But why are some diagonal lines lowered by 1/8 and other lines are not lowered? As explained in the previous section, as a consequence of the carry-save adder truncation, the table lookup may end up one cell lower than the actual p value would indicate, i.e. the p value for the table index is 1/8 lower than that actual value. Thus, both the correct cell and the cell below must satisfy the SRT constraints. Thus, the line moves down if that makes the constraints stricter but does not move down if that would expand the redundant area. In particular, the top line must not be move down, but clearly Intel moved the line down and generated the faulty lookup table.

Intel, however, has a different explanation for the bug. The Intel white paper states that the problem was in a script that downloaded the table into a PLA: an error caused the script to omit a few entries from the PLA.27 I don't believe this explanation: the missing terms match a mathematical error, not a copying error. I suspect that Intel's statement is technically true but misleading: they ran a C program (which they called a script) to generate the table but the program had a mathematical error in the bounds.

In his book "The Pentium Chronicles", Robert Colwell, architect of the Pentium Pro, provides a different explanation of the FDIV bug. Colwell claims that the Pentium design originally used the same lookup table as the 486, but shortly before release, the engineers were pressured by management to shrink the circuitry to save die space. The engineers optimized the table to make it smaller and had a proof that the optimization would work. Unfortunately, the proof was faulty, but the testers trusted the engineers and didn't test the modification thoroughly, causing the Pentium to be released with the bug. The problem with this explanation is that the Pentium was designed from the start with a completely different division algorithm from the 486: the Pentium uses radix-4 SRT, while the 486 uses standard binary division. Since the 486 doesn't have a lookup table, the story falls apart. Moreover, the PLA could trivially have been made smaller by removing the 8 unused rows, so the engineers clearly weren't trying to shrink it. My suspicion is that since Colwell developed the Pentium Pro in Oregon but the original Pentium was developed in California, Colwell didn't get firsthand information on the Pentium problems.

How Intel fixed the bug

Intel's fix for the bug was straightforward but also surprising. You'd expect that Intel added the five missing table values to the PLA, and this is what was reported at the time. The New York Times wrote that Intel fixed the flaw by adding several dozen transistors to the chip. EE Times wrote that "The fix entailed adding terms, or additional gate-sequences, to the PLA."

However, the updated PLA (below) shows something entirely different. The updated PLA is exactly the same size as the original PLA. However, about 1/3 of the terms were removed from the PLA, eliminating hundreds of transistors. Only 74 of the PLA's 120 rows are used, and the rest are left empty. (The original PLA had 8 empty rows.) How could removing terms from the PLA fix the problem?

The explanation is that Intel didn't just fill in the five missing table entries with the correct value of 2. Instead, Intel filled all the unused table entries with 2, as shown below. This has two effects. First, it eliminates any possibility of hitting a mistakenly-empty entry. Second, it makes the PLA equations much simpler. You might think that more entries in the table would make the PLA larger, but the number of PLA terms depends on the structure of the data. By filling the unused cells with 2, the jagged borders between the unused regions (white) and the "2" regions (yellow) disappear. As explained earlier, a large rectangle can be covered by a single PLA term, but a jagged border requires a lot of terms. Thus, the updated PLA is about 1/3 smaller than the original, flawed PLA. One consequence is that the terms in the new PLA are completely different from the terms in the old PLA so one can't point to the specific transistors that fixed the bug.

The image below shows the first 14 rows of the faulty PLA and the first 14 rows of the fixed PLA. As you can see, the transistor pattern (and thus the PLA terms) are entirely different. The doped silicon is darkened in the second image due to differences in how I processed the dies to remove the metal layers.

Impact of the FDIV bug

How important is the Pentium bug? This became a highly controversial topic. A failure of a random division operation is very rare: about one in 9 billion values will trigger the bug. Moreover, an erroneous division is still mostly accurate: the error is usually in the 9th or 10th decimal digit, with rare worst-case error in the 4th significant digit. Intel's whitepaper claimed that a typical user would encounter a problem once every 27,000 years, insignificant compared to other sources of error such as DRAM bit flips. Intel said: "Our overall conclusion is that the flaw in the floating point unit of the Pentium processor is of no concern to the vast majority of users. A few users of applications in the scientific/engineering and financial engineering fields may need to employ either an updated processor without the flaw or a software workaround."

However, IBM performed their own analysis,29 suggesting that the problem could hit customers every few days, and IBM suspended Pentium sales. (Coincidentally, IBM had a competing processor, the PowerPC.) The battle made it to major newspapers; the Los Angeles Times split the difference with Study Finds Both IBM, Intel Off on Error Rate. Intel soon gave in and agreed to replace all the Pentiums, making the issue moot.

I mostly agree with Intel's analysis. It appears that only one person (Professor Nicely) noticed the bug in actual use.28 The IBM analysis seems contrived to hit numbers that trigger the error. Most people would never hit the bug and even if they hit it, a small degradation in floating-point accuracy is unlikely to matter to most people. Looking at society as a whole, replacing the Pentiums was a huge expense for minimal gain. On the other hand, it's reasonable for customers to expect an accurate processor.

Note that the Pentium bug is deterministic: if you use a specific divisor and dividend that trigger the problem, you will get the wrong answer 100% of the time. Pentium engineer Ken Shoemaker suggested that the outcry over the bug was because it was so easy for customers to reproduce. It was hard for Intel to argue that customers would never encounter the bug when customers could trivially see the bug on their own computer, even if the situation was artificial.

Conclusions

The FDIV bug is one of the most famous processor bugs. By examining the die, it is possible to see exactly where it is on the chip. But Intel has had other important bugs. Some early 386 processors had a 32-bit multiply problem. Unlike the deterministic FDIV bug, the 386 would unpredictably produce the wrong results under particular temperature/voltage/frequency conditions. The underlying issue was a layout problem that didn't provide enough electrical margin to handle the worst-case situation. Intel sold the faulty chips but restricted them to the 16-bit market; bad chips were labeled "16 BIT S/W ONLY", while the good processors were marked with a double sigma. Although Intel had to suffer through embarrassing headlines such as Some 386 Systems Won't Run 32-Bit Software, Intel Says, the bug was soon forgotten.

Another memorable Pentium issue was the "F00F bug", a problem where a particular instruction sequence starting with F0 0F would cause the processor to lock up until rebooted.30 The bug was found in 1997 and solved with an operating system update. The bug is presumably in the Pentium's voluminous microcode. The microcode is too complex for me to analyze, so don't expect a detailed blog post on this subject. :-)

You might wonder why Intel needed to release a new revision of the Pentium to fix the FDIV bug, rather than just updating the microcode. The problem was that microcode for the Pentium (and earlier processors) was hard-coded into a ROM and couldn't be modified. Intel added patchable microcode to the Pentium Pro (1995), allowing limited modifications to the microcode. Intel originally implemented this feature for chip debugging and testing. But after the FDIV bug, Intel realized that patchable microcode was valuable for bug fixes too.31 The Pentium Pro stores microcode in ROM, but it also has a static RAM that holds up to 60 microinstructions. During boot, the BIOS can load a microcode patch into this RAM. In modern Intel processors, microcode patches have been used for problems ranging from the Spectre vulnerability to voltage problems.

As the number of transistors in a processor increased exponentially, as described by Moore's Law, processors used more complex circuits and algorithms. Division is one example. Early microprocessors such as the Intel 8080 (1974, 6000 transistors) had no hardware support for division or floating point arithmetic. The Intel 8086 (1978, 29,000 transistors) implemented integer division in microcode but required the 8087 coprocessor chip for floating point. The Intel 486 (1989, 1.2 million transistors) added floating-point support on the chip. The Pentium (1993, 3.1 million transistors) moved to the faster but more complicated SRT division algorithm. The Pentium's division PLA alone has roughly 4900 transistor sites, more than a MOS Technology 6502 processor—one component of the Pentium's division circuitry uses more transistors than an entire 1975 processor.

The long-term effect of the FDIV bug on Intel is a subject of debate. On the one hand, competitors such as AMD benefitted from Intel's error. AMD's ads poked fun at the Pentium's problems by listing features of AMD's chips such as "You don't have to double check your math" and "Can actually handle the rigors of complex calculations like division." On the other hand, Robert Colwell, architect of the Pentium Pro, said that the FDIV bug may have been a net benefit to Intel as it created enormous name recognition for the Pentium, along with a demonstration that Intel was willing to back up its brand name. Industry writers agreed; see The Upside of the Pentium Bug. In any case, Intel survived the FDIV bug; time will tell how Intel survives its current problems.

I plan to write more about the implementation of the Pentium's PLA, the adder, and the test circuitry. Until then, you may enjoy reading about the Pentium Navajo rug. (The rug represents the P54C variant of the Pentium, so it is safe from the FDIV bug.) Thanks to Bob Colwell and Ken Shoemaker for helpful discussions.

Footnotes and references

I was studying the silicon die of the Pentium processor and noticed some puzzling structures where signal lines were connected to the silicon substrate for no apparent reason. Two examples are in the photo below, where the metal wiring (orange) connects to small square regions of doped silicon (gray), isolated from the rest of the circuitry. I did some investigation and learned that these structures are "antenna diodes," special diodes that protect the circuitry from damage during manufacturing. In this blog post, I discuss the construction of the Pentium and explain how these antenna diodes work.

Intel released the Pentium processor in 1993, starting a long-running brand of high-performance processors: the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and so on. In this post, I'm studying the original Pentium, which has 3.1 million transistors.1 The die photo below shows the Pentium's fingernail-sized silicon die under a microscope. The chip has three layers of metal wiring on top of the silicon so the underlying silicon is almost entirely obscured.

Modern processors are built from CMOS circuitry, which uses two types of transistors: NMOS and PMOS. The diagram below shows how an NMOS transistor is constructed. A transistor can be considered a switch between the source and drain, controlled by the gate. The source and drain regions (green) consist of silicon doped with impurities to change its semiconductor properties, forming N+ silicon. The gate consists of a layer of polysilicon (red), separated from the silicon by an absurdly thin insulating oxide layer. Since the oxide layer is just a few hundred atoms thick,2 it is very fragile and easily damaged by excess voltage. (This is why CMOS chips are sensitive to static electricity.) As we will see, the oxide layer can also be damaged by voltage during manufacturing.

The Pentium processor is constructed from multiple layers. Starting at the bottom, the Pentium has millions of transistors similar to the diagram above. Polysilicon wiring on top of the silicon not only forms the transistor gates but also provides short-range wiring. Above that, three layers of metal wiring connect the parts of the chip. Roughly speaking, the bottom layer of metal connects to the silicon and polysilicon to construct logic gates from the transistors, while the upper layers of wiring travel longer distances, with one layer for signals traveling horizontally and the other layer for signals traveling vertically. Tiny tungsten plugs called vias provide connections between the different layers of wiring. A key challenge of chip design is routing, directing signals through the multiple layers of wiring while packing the circuitry as densely as possible.

The photo below shows a small region of the Pentium die with the three metal layers visible. The golden vertical lines are the top metal layer, formed from aluminum and copper. Underneath, you can see the horizontal wiring of the middle metal layer. The more complex wiring of the bottom metal layer can be seen, along with the silicon and polysilicon that form transistors. The small black dots are the tungsten vias that connect metal layers, while the larger dark circles are contacts with the underlying silicon or polysilicon. Near the bottom of the photo, the vertical gray bands are polysilicon lines, forming transistor gates. Although the chip appears flat, it has a three-dimensional structure with multiple layers of metal separated by insulating layers of silicon dioxide. This three-dimensional structure will be important in the discussion below. (The metal wiring is much denser over most of the chip; this region is one of the rare spots where all the layers are visible.)

The manufacturing process for an integrated circuit is extraordinarily complicated but I'll skip over most of the details and focus on how each metal layer is constructed, layer by layer. First, a uniform metal layer is constructed over the silicon wafer. Next, the desired pattern is produced on the surface using a process called photolithography: a light-sensitive chemical called "resist" is applied to the wafer and exposed to light through a patterned mask. The light hardens the resist, creating a protective coating with the pattern of the desired wiring. Finally, the unprotected metal is etched away, leaving the wiring.

In the early days of integrated circuits, the metal was removed with liquid acids, a process called wet etching. Inconveniently, wet etching tended to eat away metal underneath the edges of the mask, which became a problem as integrated circuits became denser and the wires needed to be thinner. The solution was dry etch, using a plasma to remove the metal. By applying a large voltage to plates above and below the chip, a gas such as HCl is ionized into a highly reactive plasma. This plasma attacks the surface (unless it is protected by the resist), removing the unwanted metal. The advantage of dry etching is that it can act vertically (anisotropically), providing more control over the line width.

Although plasma etching improved the etching process, it caused another problem: plasma-induced oxide damage, also called (metaphorically) the "antenna effect."3 The problem is that long metal wires on the chip could pick up an electrical charge from the plasma, producing a large voltage. As described earlier, the thin oxide layer under a transistor's gate is sensitive to voltage damage. The voltage induced by the plasma can destroy the transistor by blowing a hole through the gate oxide or it can degrade the transistor's performance by embedding charges inside the oxide layer.4

Several factors affect the risk of damage from the antenna effect. First, only the transistor's gate is sensitive to the induced voltage, due to the oxide layer. If the wire is also connected to a transistor's source or drain, the wire is "safe" since the source and drain provide connections to the chip's substrate, allowing the charge to dissipate harmlessly. Note that when the chip is completed, every transistor gate is connected to another transistor's source or drain (which provides the signal to the gate), so there is no risk of damage. Thus, the problem can only occur during manufacturing, with a metal line that is connected to a gate on one end but isn't connected on the other end. Moreover, the highest layer of metal is "safe" since everything is connected at that point. Another factor is that the induced voltage is proportional to the length of the metal wire, so short wires don't pose a risk. Finally, only the metal layer currently being etched poses a risk; since the lower layers are insulated by the thick oxide between layers, they won't pick up charge.

These factors motivate several ways to prevent antenna problems.5 First, a long wire can be broken into shorter segments, connected by jumpers on a higher layer. Second, moving long wires to the top metal layer eliminates problems.6 Third, diodes can be added to drain the charge from the wire; these are called "antenna diodes". When the chip is in use, the antenna diodes are reverse-biased so they have no electrical effect. But during manufacturing, the antenna diodes let charge flow to the substrate before it causes problems.

The third solution, the antenna diodes, explains the mysterious connections that I saw in the Pentium. In the diagram below, these diodes are visible on the die as square regions of doped silicon. The larger regions of doped silicon form PMOS transistors (upper) and NMOS transistors (lower). The polysilicon lines are faintly visible; they form transistor gates where they cross the doped silicon. (For this photo, I removed all the metal wiring.)

Confusingly, the antenna diodes look almost identical to "well taps", connections from the substrate to the chip's positive voltage supply, but have a completely different purpose. In the Pentium, the PMOS transistors are constructed in "wells" of N-type silicon. These wells must be raised to the chip's positive voltage, so there are numerous well tap connections from the positive supply to the wells. The well taps consist of squares of N+ doped silicon in the the N-type silicon well, providing an electrical connection. On the other hand, the antenna diodes also consist of N+ doped silicon, but embedded in P-type silicon. This forms a P-N junction that creates the diode.

In the Pentium, antenna diodes are used for only a small fraction of the wiring. The diodes require extra area on the die, so they are used only when necessary. Most of the antenna problems on the Pentium were apparently resolved through routing. Although the antenna diodes are relatively rare, they are still frequent enough that they caught my attention.

Antenna effects are still an issue in modern integrated circuits. Integrated circuit fabricators provide rules on the maximum allowable size of antenna wires for a particular manufacturing process.7 Software checks the design to ensure that the antenna rules are not violated, modifying the routing and inserting diodes as necessary. Violating the antenna rules can result in damaged chips and a very low yield, so it's more than just a theoretical issue.

Thanks to /r/chipdesign and Discord for discussion. If you're interested in the Pentium, I've written about standard cells in the Pentium, and the Pentium as a Navajo rug. Follow me on Mastodon (@kenshirriff@oldbytes.space) or Bluesky (@righto.com) or RSS for updates.

Notes and references

Forbes recently published the Forbes 400 List for 2024, listing the 400 richest people in the United States. This inspired me to make a histogram to show the distribution of wealth in the United States. It turns out that if you put Elon Musk on the graph, almost the entire US population is crammed into a vertical bar, one pixel wide. Each pixel is $500 million wide, illustrating that $500 million essentially rounds to zero from the perspective of the wealthiest Americans.

The histogram above shows the wealth distribution in red. Note that the visible red line is one pixel wide at the left and disappears everywhere else—this is the important point: essentially the entire US population is in that first bar. The graph is drawn with the scale of 1 pixel = $500 million in the X axis, and 1 pixel = 1 million people in the Y axis. Away from the origin, the red line is invisible—a tiny fraction of a pixel tall since so few people have more than 500 million dollars.

Since the median US household wealth is about $190,000, half the population would be crammed into a microscopic red line 1/2500 of a pixel wide using the scale above. (The line would be much narrower than the wavelength of light so it would be literally invisible). The very rich are so rich that you could take someone with a thousand times the median amount of money, and they would still have almost nothing compared to the richest Americans. If you increased their money by a factor of a thousand yet again, you'd be at Bezos' level, but still well short of Elon Musk.

Another way to visualize the extreme distribution of wealth in the US is to imagine everyone in the US standing up while someone counts off millions of dollars, once per second. When your net worth is reached, you sit down. At the first count of $1 million, most people sit down, with 22 million people left standing. As the count continues—$2 million, $3 million, $4 million—more people sit down. After 6 seconds, everyone except the "1%" has taken their seat. As the counting approaches the 17-minute mark, only billionaires are left standing, but there are still days of counting ahead. Bill Gates sits down after a bit over one day, leaving 8 people, but the process is nowhere near the end. After about two days and 20 hours of counting, Elon Musk finally sits down.

Sources

The main source of data is the Forbes 400 List for 2024. Forbes claims there are 813 billionaires in the US here. Median wealth data is from the Federal Reserve; note that it is from 2022 and household rather than personal. The current US population estimate is from Worldometer. I estimated wealth above $500 million, extrapolating from 2019 data.

I made a similar graph in 2013; you can see my post here for comparison.

Disclaimers: Wealth data has a lot of sources of error including people vs households, what gets counted, and changing time periods, but I've tried to make this graph as accurate as possible. I'm not making any prescriptive judgements here, just presenting the data. Obviously, if you want to see the details of the curve, a logarithmic scale makes more sense, but I want to show the "true" shape of the curve. I should also mention that wealth and income are very different things; this post looks strictly at wealth.

We recently received an attitude indicator for the F-4 fighter plane, an instrument that uses a rotating ball to show the aircraft's orientation and direction. In a normal aircraft, the artificial horizon shows the orientation in two axes (pitch and roll), but the F-4 indicator uses a rotating ball to show the orientation in three axes, adding azimuth (yaw).1 It wasn't obvious to me how the ball could rotate in three axes: how could it turn in every direction and still remain attached to the instrument?

We disassembled the indicator, reverse-engineered its 1960s-era circuitry, fixed some problems,2 and got it spinning. The video clip below shows the indicator rotating around three axes. In this blog post, I discuss the mechanical and electrical construction of this indicator. (The quick explanation is that the ball is really two hollow half-shells attached to the internal mechanism at the "poles"; the shells rotate while the "equator" remains stationary.)

The F-4 aircraft

The indicator was used in the F-4 Phantom II3 so the pilot could keep track of the aircraft's orientation during high-speed maneuvers. The F-4 was a supersonic fighter manufactured from 1958 to 1981. Over 5000 were produced, making it the most-produced American supersonic aircraft ever. It was the main US fighter jet in the Vietnam War, operating from aircraft carriers. The F-4 was still used in the 1990s during the Gulf War, suppressing air defenses in the "Wild Weasel" role. The F-4 was capable of carrying nuclear bombs.4

The F-4 was a two-seat aircraft, with the radar intercept officer controlling radar and weapons from a seat behind the pilot. Both cockpits had a panel crammed with instruments, with additional instruments and controls on the sides. As shown below, the pilot's panel had the three-axis attitude indicator in the central position, just below the reddish radar scope, reflecting its importance.5 (The rear cockpit had a simpler two-axis attitude indicator.)

The attitude indicator mechanism

The ball inside the indicator shows the aircraft's position in three axes. The roll axis indicates the aircraft's angle if it rolls side-to-side along its axis of flight. The pitch axis indicates the aircraft's angle if it pitches up or down. Finally, the azimuth axis indicates the compass direction that the aircraft is heading, changed by the aircraft's turning left or right (yaw). The indicator also has moving needles and status flags, but in this post I'm focusing on the rotating ball.6

The indicator uses three motors to move the ball. The roll motor (below) is attached to the frame of the indicator, while the pitch and azimuth motors are inside the ball. The ball is held in place by the roll gimbal, which is attached to the ball mechanism at the top and bottom pivot points. The roll motor turns the roll gimbal and thus the ball, providing a clockwise/counterclockwise movement. The roll control transformer provides position feedback. Note the numerous wires on the roll gimbal, connected to the mechanism inside the ball.

The diagram below shows the mechanism inside the ball, after removing the hemispherical shells of the ball. When the roll gimbal is rotated, this mechanism rotates with it. The pitch motor causes the entire mechanism to rotate around the pitch axis (horizontal here), which is attached along the "equator". The azimuth motor and control transformer are behind the pitch components, not visible in this photo. The azimuth motor turns the vertical shaft. The two hollow hemispheres of the ball attach to the top and bottom of the shaft. Thus, the azimuth motor rotates the ball shells around the azimuth axis, while the mechanism itself remains stationary.

Why doesn't the wiring get tangled up as the ball rotates? The solution is two sets of slip rings to implement the electrical connections. The photo below shows the first slip ring assembly, which handles rotation around the roll axis. These slip rings connect the stationary part of the instrument to the rotating roll gimbal. The black base and the vertical wires are attached to the instrument, while the striped shaft in the middle rotates with the ball assembly housing. Inside the shaft, wires go from the circular metal contacts to the roll gimbal.

Inside the ball, a second set of slip rings provides the electrical connection between the wiring on the roll gimbal and the ball mechanism. The photo below shows the connections to these slip rings, handling rotation around the pitch axis (horizontal in this photo). (The slip rings themselves are inside and are not visible.) The shaft sticking out of the assembly rotates around the azimuth (yaw) axis. The ball hemisphere is attached to the metal disk. The azimuth axis does not require slip rings since only the ball shells rotates; the electronics remain stationary.

The servo loop

In this section, I'll explain how the motors are controlled by servo loops. The attitude indicator is driven by an external gyroscope, receiving electrical signals indicating the roll, pitch, and azimuth positions. As was common in 1960s avionics, the signals are transmitted from synchros, which use three wires to indicate an angle. The motors inside the attitude indicator rotate until the indicator's angles for the three axes match the input angles.

Each motor is controlled by a servo loop, shown below. The goal is to rotate the output shaft to an angle that exactly matches the input angle, specified by the three synchro wires. The key is a device called a control transformer, which takes the three-wire input angle and a physical shaft rotation, and generates an error signal indicating the difference between the desired angle and the physical angle. The amplifier drives the motor in the appropriate direction until the error signal drops to zero. To improve the dynamic response of the servo loop, the tachometer signal is used as a negative feedback voltage. This ensures that the motor slows as the system gets closer to the right position, so the motor doesn't overshoot the position and oscillate. (This is sort of like a PID controller.)

In more detail, the external gyroscope unit contains synchro transmitters, small devices that convert the angular position of a shaft into AC signals on three wires. The photo below shows a typical synchro, with the input shaft on the top and five wires at the bottom: two for power and three for the output.

Internally, the synchro has a rotating winding called the rotor that is driven with 400 Hz AC. Three fixed stator windings provide the three AC output signals. As the shaft rotates, the phase and voltage of the output signals changes, indicating the angle. (Synchros may seem bizarre, but they were extensively used in the 1950s and 1960s to transmit angular information in ships and aircraft.)

The attitude indicator uses control transformers to process these input signals. A control transformer is similar to a synchro in appearance and construction, but it is wired differently. The three stator windings receive the inputs and the rotor winding provides the error output. If the rotor angle of the synchro transmitter and control transformer are the same, the signals cancel out and there is no error output. But as the difference between the two shaft angles increases, the rotor winding produces an error signal. The phase of the error signal indicates the direction of error.

The next component is the motor/tachometer, a special motor that was often used in avionics servo loops. This motor is more complicated than a regular electric motor. The motor is powered by 115 volts AC, 400-Hertz, but this isn't sufficient to get the motor spinning. The motor also has two low-voltage AC control windings. Energizing a control winding will cause the motor to spin in one direction or the other.

The motor/tachometer unit also contains a tachometer to measure its rotational speed, for use in a feedback loop. The tachometer is driven by another 115-volt AC winding and generates a low-voltage AC signal proportional to the rotational speed of the motor.

The photo above shows a motor/tachometer with the rotor removed. The unit has many wires because of its multiple windings. The rotor has two drums. The drum on the left, with the spiral stripes, is for the motor. This drum is a "squirrel-cage rotor", which spins due to induced currents. (There are no electrical connections to the rotor; the drums interact with the windings through magnetic fields.) The drum on the right is the tachometer rotor; it induces a signal in the output winding proportional to the speed due to eddy currents. The tachometer signal is at 400 Hz like the driving signal, either in phase or 180º out of phase, depending on the direction of rotation. For more information on how a motor/generator works, see my teardown.

The amplifier

The motors are powered by an amplifier assembly that contains three separate error amplifiers, one for each axis. I had to reverse engineer the amplifier assembly in order to get the indicator working. The assembly mounts on the back of the attitude indicator and connects to one of the indicator's round connectors. Note the cutout in the lower left of the amplifier assembly to provide access to the second connector on the back of the indicator. The aircraft connects to the indicator through the second connector and the indicator passes the input signals to the amplifier through the connector shown above.

The amplifier assembly contains three amplifier boards (for roll, pitch, and azimuth), a DC power supply board, an AC transformer, and a trim potentiometer.7 The photo below shows the amplifier assembly mounted on the back of the instrument. At the left, the AC transformer produces the motor control voltage and powers the power supply board, mounted vertically on the right. The assembly has three identical amplifier boards; the middle board has been unmounted to show the components. The amplifier connects to the instrument through a round connector below the transformer. The round connector at the upper left is on the instrument case (not the amplifier) and provides the connection between the aircraft and the instrument.8

The photo below shows one of the three amplifier boards. The construction is unusual, with some components stacked on top of other components to save space. Some of the component leads are long and protected with clear plastic sleeves. The board is connected to the rest of the amplifier assembly through a bundle of point-to-point wires, visible on the left. The round pulse transformer in the middle has five colorful wires coming out of it. At the right are the two transistors that drive the motor's control windings, with two capacitors between them. The transistors are mounted on a heat sink that is screwed down to the case of the amplifier assembly for cooling. The board is covered with a conformal coating to protect it from moisture or contaminants.

The function of each amplifier board is to generate the two control signals so the motor rotates in the appropriate direction based on the error signal fed into the amplifier. The amplifier also uses the tachometer output from the motor unit to slow the motor as the error signal decreases, preventing overshoot. The inputs to the amplifier are 400 hertz AC signals, with the phase indicating positive or negative error. The outputs drive the two control windings of the motor, determining which direction the motor rotates.

The schematic for the amplifier board is below. The two transistors on the left amplify the error and tachometer signals, driving the pulse transformer. The outputs of the pulse transformer will have opposite phase, driving the output transistors for opposite halves of the 400 Hz cycle. One of the transistors will be in the right phase to turn on and pull the motor control AC to ground, while the other transistor will be in the wrong phase. Thus, the appropriate control winding will be activated (for half the cycle), causing the motor to spin in the desired direction.

It turns out that there are two versions of the attitude indicator that use incompatible amplifiers. I think that the motors for the newer indicators have a single control winding rather than two. Fortunately, the connectors are keyed differently so you can't attach the wrong amplifier. The second amplifier (below) looks slightly more modern (1980s) with a double-sided circuit board and more components in place of the pulse transformer.

The pitch trim circuit

The attitude indicator has a pitch trim knob in the lower right, although the knob was missing from ours. The pitch trim adjustment turns out to be rather complicated. In level flight, an aircraft may have its nose angled up or down slightly to achieve the desired angle of attack. The pilot wants the attitude indicator to show level flight, even though the aircraft is slightly angled, so the indicator can be adjusted with the pitch trim knob. However, the problem is that a fighter plane may, for instance, do a vertical 90º climb. In this case, the attitude indicator should show the actual attitude and ignore the pitch trim adjustment.

I found a 1957 patent that explained how this is implemented. The solution is to "fade out" the trim adjustment when the aircraft moves away from horizontal flight. This is implemented with a special multi-zone potentiometer that is controlled by the pitch angle.

The schematic below shows how the pitch trim signal is generated from the special pitch angle potentiometer and the pilot's pitch trim adjustment. Like most signals in the attitude indicator, the pitch trim is a 400 Hz AC signal, with the phase indicating positive or negative. Ignoring the pitch angle for a moment, the drive signal into the transformer will be AC. The split windings of the transformer will generate a positive phase and a negative phase signal. Adjusting the pitch trim potentiometer lets the pilot vary the trim signal from positive to zero to negative, applying the desired correction to the indicator.

Now, look at the complex pitch angle potentiometer. It has alternating resistive and conducting segments, with AC fed into opposite sides. (Note that +AC and -AC refer to the phase, not the voltage.) Because the resistances are equal, the AC signals will cancel out at the top and the bottom, yielding 0 volts on those segments. If the aircraft is roughly horizontal, the potentiometer wiper will pick up the positive-phase AC and feed it into the transformer, providing the desired trim adjustment as described previously. However, if the aircraft is climbing nearly vertically, the wiper will pick up the 0-volt signal, so there will be no pitch trim adjustment. For an angle range in between, the resistance of the potentiometer will cause the pitch trim signal to smoothly fade out. Likewise, if the aircraft is steeply diving, the wiper will pick up the 0 signal at the bottom, removing the pitch trim. And if the aircraft is inverted, the wiper will pick up the negative AC phase, causing the pitch trim adjustment to be applied in the opposite direction.

Conclusions

The attitude indicator is a key instrument in any aircraft, especially important when flying in low visibility. The F-4's attitude indicator goes beyond the artificial horizon indicator in a typical aircraft, adding a third axis to show the aircraft's heading. Supporting a third axis makes the instrument much more complicated, though. Looking inside the indicator reveals how the ball rotates in three axes while still remaining firmly attached.

Modern fighter planes avoid complex electromechanical instruments. Instead, they provide a "glass cockpit" with most data provided digitally on screens. For instance, the F-35's console replaces all the instruments with a wide panoramic touchscreen displaying the desired information in color. Nonetheless, mechanical instruments have a special charm, despite their impracticality.

For more, follow me on Mastodon as @kenshirriff@oldbytes.space or RSS. (I've given up on Twitter.) I worked on this project with CuriousMarc and Eric Schlapfer, so expect a video at some point. Thanks to John Pumpkinhead and another collector for supplying the indicators and amplifiers.

Notes and references

Specifications9

Ferroelectric memory (FRAM) is an interesting storage technique that stores bits in a special "ferroelectric" material. Ferroelectric memory is nonvolatile like flash memory, able to hold its data for decades. But, unlike flash, ferroelectric memory can write data rapidly. Moreover, FRAM is much more durable than flash and can be be written trillions of times. With these advantages, you might wonder why FRAM isn't more popular. The problem is that FRAM is much more expensive than flash, so it is only used in niche applications.

This post takes a look inside an FRAM chip from 1999, designed by a company called Ramtron. The die photo above shows this 64-kilobit chip under a microscope; the four large dark stripes are the memory cells, containing tiny cubes of ferroelectric material. The horizontal greenish bands are the drivers to select a column of memory, while the vertical greenish band at the right holds the sense amplifiers that amplify the tiny signals from the memory cells. The eight whitish squares around the border of the die are the bond pads, which are connected to the chip's eight pins.1 The logic circuitry at the left and right of the die implements the serial (I²C) interface for communication with the chip.2

The history of ferroelectric memory dates back to the early 1950s.3 Many companies worked on FRAM from the 1950s to the 1970s, including Bell Labs, IBM, RCA, and Ford. The 1955 photo below shows a 256-bit ferroelectric memory built by Bell Labs. Unfortunately, ferroelectric memory had many problems,4 limiting it to specialized applications, and development was mostly abandoned by the 1970s.

Ferroelectric memory had a second chance, though. A major proponent of ferroelectric memory was George Rohrer, who started working on ferroelectric memory in 1968. He formed a memory company, Technovation, which was unsuccessful, and then cofounded Ramtron in 1984.5 Ramtron produced a tiny 256-bit memory chip in 1988, followed by much larger memories in the 1990s.

How FRAM works

Ferroelectric memory uses a special material with the property of ferroelectricity. In a normal capacitor, applying an electric field causes the positive and negative charges to separate in the dielectric material, making it polarized. However, ferroelectric materials are special because they will retain this polarization even when the electric field is removed. By polarizing a ferroelectric material positively or negatively, a bit of data can be stored. (The name "ferroelectric" is in analogy to "ferromagnetic", even though ferroelectric materials are not ferrous.)

This FRAM chip uses a ferroelectric material called lead zirconate titanate or PZT, containing lead, zirconium, titanium, and oxygen. The diagram below shows how an applied electric field causes the titanium or zirconium atom to physically move inside the crystal lattice, causing the ferroelectric effect. (Red atoms are lead, purple are oxygen, and yellow are zirconium or titanium.) Because the atoms physically change position, the polarization is stable for decades; in contrast, the capacitors in a DRAM chip lose their data in milliseconds unless refreshed. FRAM memory will eventually wear out, but it can be written trillions of times, much more than flash or EEPROM memory.

To store data, FRAM uses ferroelectric capacitors, capacitors with a ferroelectric material as the dielectric between the plates. Applying a voltage to the capacitor will create an electric field, polarizing the ferroelectric material. A positive voltage will store a 1, and a negative voltage will store a 0.

Reading a bit from memory is a bit tricky. A positive voltage is applied, forcing the material into the 1 state. If the material was already in the 1 state, minimal current will flow. But if the material was in the 0 state, more current will flow as the capacitor changes state. This allows the 0 and 1 states to be distinguished.

Note that reading the bit destroys the stored value. Thus, after a read, the 0 or 1 value must be written back to the capacitor to restore its previous state. (This is very similar to the magnetic core memory that was used in the 1960s.)6

The FRAM chip that I examined uses two capacitors per bit, storing opposite values. This approach makes it easier to distinguish a 1 from a 0: a sense amplifier compares the two tiny signals and generates a 1 or a 0 depending on which is larger. The downside of this approach is that using two capacitors per bit reduces the memory capacity. Later FRAMs increased the density by using one capacitor per bit, along with reference cells for comparison.7

A closer look at the die

The diagram below shows the main functional blocks of the chip.8 The memory itself is partitioned into four blocks. The word line decoders select the appropriate column for the address and the drivers generate the pulses on the word and plate lines. The signals from that column go to the sense amplifiers on the right, where the signals are converted to bits and written back to memory. On the left, the precharge circuitry charges the bit lines to a fixed voltage at the start of the memory cycle, while the decoders select the desired byte from the bit lines.

The diagram below shows a closeup of the memory. I removed the top metal layer and many of the memory cells to reveal the underlying structure. The structure is very three-dimensional compared to regular chips; the gray squares in the image are cubes of PZT, sitting on top of the plate lines. The brown rectangles labeled "top plate connection" are also three-dimensional; they are S-shaped brackets with the low end attached to the silicon and the high end contacting the top of the PZT cube. Thus, each PZT cube forms a capacitor with the plate line forming the bottom plate of the capacitor, the bracket forming the top plate connection, and the PZT cube sandwiched in between, providing the ferroelectric dielectric. (Some cubes have been knocked loose in this photo and are sitting at an angle; the cubes form a regular grid in the original chip.)

The physical design of the chip is complicated and quite different from a typical planar integrated circuit. Each capacitor requires a cube of PZT sandwiched between platinum electrodes, with the three-dimensional contact from the top of the capacitor to the silicon. Creating these structures requires numerous steps that aren't used in normal integrated circuit fabrication. (See the footnote9 for details.) Moreover, the metal ions in the PZT material can contaminate the silicon production facility unless great care is taken, such as using a separate facility to apply the ferroelectric layer and all subsequent steps.10 The additional fabrication steps and unusual materials significantly increase the cost of manufacturing FRAM.

Each top plate connection has an associated transistor, gated by a vertical word line.11 The transistors are connected to horizontal bit lines, metal lines that were removed for this photo. A memory cell, containing two capacitors, measures about 4.2 µm × 6.5 µm. The PZT cubes are spaced about 2.1 µm apart. The transistor gate length is roughly 700 nm. The 700 nm node was introduced in 1993, while the die contains a 1999 copyright date, so the chip appears to be a few years behind the cutting edge as far as node.

The memory is organized as 256 capacitors horizontally by 512 capacitors vertically, for a total of 64 kilobits (since each bit requires two capacitors). The memory is accessed as 8192 bytes. Curiously, the columns are numbered on the die, as shown below.

The photo below shows the sense amplifiers to the right of the memory, with some large transistors to boost the signal. Each sense amplifier receives two signals from the pair of capacitors holding a bit. The sense amplifier determines which signal is larger, deciding if the bit is a 0 or 1. Because the signals are very small, the sense amplifier must be very sensitive. The amplifier has two cross-connected transistors with each transistor trying to pull the other signal low. The signal that starts off larger will "win", creating a solid 0 or 1 signal. This value is rewritten to memory to restore the value, since reading the value erases the cells. In the photo, a few of the ferroelectric capacitors are visible at the far left. Part of the lower metal layer has come loose, causing the randomly strewn brown rectangles.

The photo below shows eight of the plate drivers, below the memory cells. This circuit generates the pulse on the selected plate line. The plate lines are the thick white lines at the top of the image; they are platinum so they appear brighter in the photo than the other metal lines. Most of the capacitors are still present on the plate lines, but some capacitors have come loose and are scattered on the rest of the circuitry. Each plate line is connected to a metal line (brown), which connects the plate line to the drive transistors in the middle and bottom of the image. These transistors pull the appropriate plate line high or low as necessary. The columns of small black circles are connections between the metal line and the silicon of the transistor underneath.

Finally, here's the part number and Ramtron logo on the die.

Conclusions

Ferroelectric RAM is an example of a technology with many advantages that never achieved the hoped-for success. Many companies worked on FRAM from the 1950s to the 1970s but gave up on it. Ramtron tried again and produced products but they were not profitable. Ramtron had hoped that the density and cost of FRAM would be competitive with DRAM, but unfortunately that didn't pan out. Ramtron was acquired by Cypress Semiconductor in 2012 and then Cypress was acquired by Infineon in 2019. Infineon still sells FRAM, but it is a niche product, for instance satellites that need radiation hardness. Currently, FRAM costs roughly $3/megabit, almost three orders of magnitude more expensive than flash memory, which is about $15/gigabit. Nonetheless, FRAM is a fascinating technology and the structures inside the chip are very interesting.

For more, follow me on Mastodon as @kenshirriff@oldbytes.space or RSS. (I've given up on Twitter.) Thanks to CuriousMarc for providing the chip, which was used in a digital readout (DRO) for his CNC machine.

Notes and references

Hurrying through the National Gallery of Art five minutes before closing, I passed a Navajo weaving with a complex abstract pattern. Suddenly, I realized the pattern was strangely familiar, so I stopped and looked closely. The design turned out to be an image of Intel's Pentium chip, the start of the long-lived Pentium family.1 The weaver, Marilou Schultz, created the artwork in 1994 using traditional materials and techniques. The rug was commissioned by Intel as a gift to AISES (American Indian Science & Engineering Society) and is currently part of an art exhibition—Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction—focusing on the intersection between abstract art and woven textiles.

I talked with Marilou Schultz, a Navajo/Diné weaver and math teacher, to learn more about the artwork. Schultz learned weaving as a child—part of four generations of weavers—carding the wool, spinning it into yarn, and then weaving it. For the Intel project, she worked from a photograph of the die, marking it into 64 sections along each side so the die pattern could be accurately transferred to the weaving. Schultz used the "raised outline" technique, which gives a three-dimensional effect along borders. One of the interesting characteristics of the Pentium from the weaving perspective is its lack of symmetry, unlike traditional rugs. The Pentium weaving was colored with traditional plant dyes; the cream regions are the natural color of the wool from the long-horned Navajo-Churro sheep.2 The yarn in the weaving is a bit finer than the yarn typically used for knitting. Weaving was a slow process, with a day's work extending the rug by 1" to 1.5".

The Pentium die photo below shows the patterns and structures on the surface of the fingernail-sized silicon die, over three million tiny transistors. The weaving is a remarkably accurate representation of the die, reproducing the processor's complex designs. However, I noticed that the weaving was a mirror image of the physical Pentium die; I had to flip the rug image below to make them match. I asked Ms. Schultz if this was an artistic decision and she explained that she wove the rug to match the photograph. There is no specific front or back to a Navajo weaving because the design is similar on both sides,3 so the gallery picked an arbitrary side to display. Unfortunately, they picked the wrong side, resulting in a backward die image. This probably bothers nobody but me, but I hope the gallery will correct this in future exhibits. For the remainder of this article, I will mirror the rug to match the physical die.

The rug is accurate enough that each region can be marked with its corresponding function in the real chip, as shown below. Starting in the center, the section labeled "integer execution units" is the heart of the processor, performing arithmetic operations and other functions on integer numbers. The Pentium is a 32-bit processor, so the integer execution unit is a vertical rectangle, 32 bits wide. The horizontal lines correspond to different types of circuitry such as adders, multipliers, shifters, and registers. To the right, the "floating point unit" performs more complex arithmetic operations on floating-point numbers, numbers with a fractional part that are used in applications such as spreadsheets and CAD drawings. Like the integer execution unit, the floating point unit has horizontal stripes corresponding to different functions. Floating-point numbers are represented with more bits, so the stripes are wider.

At the top, the "instruction fetch" section fetches the machine instructions that make up the software. The "instruction decode" section analyzes each instruction to determine what operations to perform. Simple operations, such as addition, are performed directly by the integer execution unit. Complicated instructions (a hallmark of Intel's processors) are broken down into smaller steps by the "complex instruction support" circuitry, with the steps held in the "microcode ROM". The "branch prediction logic" improves performance when the processor must make a decision for a branch instruction.

The code and data caches provide a substantial performance boost. The problem is that the processor is considerably faster than the computer's RAM memory, so the processor can end up sitting idle until program code or data is provided by memory. The solution is the cache, a small, fast memory that holds bytes that the processor is likely to need. The Pentium processor had a small cache by modern standards, holding 8 kilobytes of code and 8 kilobytes of data. (In comparison, modern processors have multiple caches, with hundreds of kilobytes in the fastest cache and megabytes in a slower cache.) Cache memories are built from an array of memory storage elements in a structured grid, visible in the rug as uniform pink rectangles. The TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer) assists the cache. Finally, the "bus interface logic" connects the processor to the computer's bus, providing access to memory and peripheral devices. Around the edges of the physical chip, tiny bond pads provide the connections between the silicon chip and the integrated circuit package. In the weaving, these tiny pads have been abstracted into small black rectangles.

The weaving is accurate enough to determine that it represents a specific Pentium variant, called P54C. The motivation for the P54C was that the original Pentium chips (called P5) were not as fast as hoped and ran hot. Intel fixed this by using a more advanced manufacturing process, reducing the feature size from 800 to 600 nanometers and running the chip at 3.3 volts instead of 5 volts. Intel also modified the chip so that when parts of the chip were idle, the clock signal could be stopped to save power. (This is the "clock driver" circuitry at the top of the weaving.) Finally, Intel added multiprocessor logic (adding 200,000 more transistors), allowing two processors to work together more easily. The improved Pentium chip was smaller, faster, and used less power. This variant was called the P54C (for reasons I haven't been able to determine). The "multiprocessor logic" is visible in the Pentium rug, showing that it is the P54C Pentium (right) and not the P5 Pentium (left).

Intel's connection with New Mexico started in 1980 when Intel opened a chip fabrication plant (fab) in Rio Rancho, a suburb north of Albuquerque. At the time, this plant, Fab 7, was Intel's largest and produced 70% of Intel's profits. Intel steadily grew the New Mexico facility, adding Fab 9 and then Fab 11, which opened in September 1995, building Pentium and Pentium Pro chips in a 140-step manufacturing process. Intel's investment in Rio Rancho has continued with a $4 billion project underway for Fab 9 and Fab 11x. Intel has been criticized for environmental issues in New Mexico, detailed in the book Intel inside New Mexico: A case study of environmental and economic injustice. Intel, however, claims a sustainable future in New Mexico, restoring watersheds, using 100% renewable electricity, and recycling construction waste.

Fairchild and Shiprock

Marilou Schultz is currently creating another weaving based on an integrated circuit, shown below. Although this chip, the Fairchild 9040, is much more obscure than the Pentium, it has important historical symbolism, as it was built by Navajo workers at a plant on Navajo land.

In 1965, Fairchild started producing semiconductors in Shiprock, New Mexico, about 200 miles northwest of Intel's future facility. Fairchild produced a brochure in 1969 to commemorate the opening of a new plant. Two of the photos in that brochure compared a traditional Navajo weaving to the pattern of a chip, which happened to be the 9040. Although Fairchild's Shiprock project started optimistically, it was suddenly shut down a decade later after an armed takeover. I'll discuss the complicated history of Fairchild in Shiprock and then describe the 9040 chip in more detail.

The story of Fairchild starts with William Shockley, who invented the junction transistor at Bell Labs, won the Nobel prize, and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to build transistors. Unfortunately, although Shockley was brilliant, he was said to be the worst manager in the history of electronics, not to mention a notorious eugenicist and racist later in life. Eight of his top employees—called the "traitorous eight"—left Shockley's company in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor. (The traitorous eight included Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce who ended up founding Intel in 1968). Noyce (co-)invented the integrated circuit in 1959 and Fairchild soon became a top semiconductor manufacturer, famous for its foundational role in Silicon Valley.

The Shiprock project was part of an attempt in the 1960s to improve the economic situation of the Navajo through industrial development. The Navajo had suffered a century of oppression including forced deportation from their land through the Long Walk (1864-1866). The Navajo were suffering from 65% unemployment, a per-capita income of $300, and a lack of basics such as roads, electricity, running water, and health care. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was now trying to encourage economic self-sufficiency by funding industrial projects on Indian land.4 Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai viewed industrialization as the only answer. Called "the first modern Navajo political leader", Nakai stated, "There are some would-be leaders of the tribe calling for the banishment of industry from the reservation and a return to the life of a century ago! But, it would not solve the problems. There is not sufficient grazing land on the reservation to support the population so industry must be brought in." Finally, Fairchild was trying to escape the high cost of Silicon Valley labor by opening plants in low-cost locations such as Maine, Australia, and Hong Kong.

These factors led Fairchild to open a manufacturing facility on Navajo land in Shiprock, New Mexico. The project started in 1965 with 50 Navajo workers in the Shiprock Community Center manufacturing transistors, rapidly increasing to 366 Navajo workers.

By 1967, Robert Noyce, group vice-president of Fairchild, regarded the Shiprock plant as successful. He explained that Fairchild was motivated both by low labor costs and by social benefits, saying, "Probably nobody would ever admit it, but I feel sure the Indians are the most underprivileged ethnic group in the United States." Two years later, Lester Hogan, Fairchild's president, stated, "I thought the Shiprock plant was one of Bob Noyce's philanthropies until I went there," but he was so impressed that he decided to expand the plant. Hogan also directed Fairchild to help build hundreds of houses for workers; since a traditional Navajo dwelling is called a hogan, the houses were dubbed Hogan's hogans.

In 1969, Fairchild opened its new facility at Shiprock and produced the commemorative brochure mentioned earlier. As well as showing the striking visual similarity between the designs of traditional Navajo weavings and modern integrated circuits, it stated that "Weaving, like all Navajo arts, is done with unique imagination and craftsmanship" and described the "blending of innate Navajo skill and [Fairchild] Semiconductor's precision assembly techniques." Fairchild later said that "rug weaving, for instance, provides an inherent ability to recognize complex patterns, a skill which makes memorizing integrated circuit patterns a minimal problem."7

However, in Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture, digital media theorist Lisa Nakamura critiques this language as a process by which "electronics assembly work became both gendered and identified with specific racialized qualities".5 Nakamura points out how "Navajo women’s affinity for electronics manufacture [was described] as both reflecting and satisfying an intrinsic gendered and racialized drive toward intricacy, detail, and quality."

At Shiprock, Fairchild employed 1200 workers,6 and all but 24 were Navajo, making Fairchild the nation's largest non-government employer of American Indians. Of the 33 production supervisors, 30 were Navajo. This project had extensive government involvement from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the U.S. Public Health Service, while the Economic Development Administration made business loans to Fairchild, the Labor Department had job training programs, and Housing and Urban Development built housing at Shiprock7.

The Shiprock plant was considered a major success story at a meeting of the National Council on Indian Opportunity in 1971.7 US Vice President Agnew called the economic deprivation and 40-80% unemployment on Indian reservations "a problem of staggering magnitude" and encouraged more industrial development. Fairchild President Hogan stated that "Fairchild's program at Shiprock has been one of the most rewarding in the history of our company, from the standpoint of a sound business as well as social responsibility." He said that at first the plant was considered the "Shiprock experiment", but the plant was "now among the most productive and efficient of any Fairchild operation in the world." Peter MacDonald, Chairman of the Navajo Tribal Council and a World War II Navajo code talker, discussed the extreme poverty and unemployment on the Navajo reservation, along with "inadequate housing, inadequate health care and the lack of viable economic activities." He referred to Fairchild as "one of the best arrangements we have ever had" providing not only employment but also supporting housing through a non-profit.

In December 1972, National Geographic highlighted the Shiprock plant as "weaving for the Space Age", stating that the Fairchild plant was the tribe's most successful economic project with Shiprock booming due to the 4.5-million-dollar annual payroll. The article states: "Though the plant runs happily today, it was at first a battleground of warring cultures." A new manager, Paul Driscoll, realized that strict "white man's rules" were counterproductive. For instance, many employees couldn't phone in if they would be absent, as they didn't have telephones. Another issue was the language barrier since many workers spoke only Navajo, not English. So when technical words didn't exist in Navajo, substitutes were found: "aluminum" became "shiny metal". Driscoll also realized that Fairchild needed to adapt to traditional nine-day religious ceremonies. Soon the monthly turnover rate dropped from 12% to under 1%, better than Fairchild's other plants.

Unfortunately, the Fairchild-Navajo manufacturing partnership soon met a dramatic end. In 1975, the semiconductor industry was suffering from the ongoing US recession. Fairchild was especially hard hit, losing money on its integrated circuits, and it shed over 8000 employees between 1973 and 1975.8 At the Shiprock plant, Fairchild laid off9 140 Navajo employees in February 1975, angering the community. A group of 20 Indians armed with high-power rifles took over the plant, demanding that Fairchild rehire the employees. Fairchild portrayed the occupiers, part of the AIM (American Indian Movement), as an "outside group—representing neither employees, tribal authorities nor the community." Peter MacDonald, chairman of the Navajo Nation, agreed with the AIM on many points but viewed the AIM occupiers as "foolish" with "little sense of Navajo history" and "no sense of the need for an Indian nation to grow" (source). MacDonald negotiated with the occupiers and the occupation ended peacefully a week later, with unconditional amnesty granted to the occupiers.10 However, concerned about future disruptions, Fairchild permanently closed the Shiprock plant and transferred production to Southeast Asia.

For the most part, the Fairchild plant was viewed as a success prior to its occupation and closure. Navajo leader MacDonald looked back on the Fairchild plant as "a cooperative effort that was succeeding for everyone" (link). Alice Funston, a Navajo forewoman at Shiprock said, "Fairchild has not only helped women get ahead, it has been good for the entire Indian community in Shiprock."11 On the other hand, Fairchild general manager Charles Sporck had a negative view looking back: "It [Shiprock] never worked out. We were really screwing up the whole societal structure of the Indian tribe. You know, the women were making money and the guys were drinking it up. We had a very major negative impact upon the Navajo tribe."12

Despite the stereotypes in Sporck's comments, he touches on important gender issues, both at Fairchild and in the electronics industry as a whole. Fairchild had long recognized the lack of jobs for men at Shiprock, despite attempts to create roles for men. In 1971, Fairchild President Hogan stated that since "semiconductor assembly operation require a great amount of detail work with tiny components, [it] lends itself to female workers. As a result, there are nearly three times as many Navajo women employed by Fairchild as men."7

The role of women in fabricating and assembling electronics is often not recognized. A 1963 report on electronics manufacturing estimated that women workers made up 41 percent of total employment in electronics manufacturing, largely in gendered roles. The report suggested that microminiaturization of semiconductors gave women an advantage over men in assembly and production-line work; women made up over 70% of semiconductor production-line workers, with 90-99% of inspecting and testing jobs. and 90-100% of assembler jobs. Women were largely locked out of non-production jobs; although women held a few technician and drafting roles, the percentage of woman engineers was too low to measure.

The defense contractor General Dynamics also had Navajo plants, but with more success than Fairchild. General Dynamics opened a Navajo Nation plant in Fort Defiance, Arizona in 1967 to make missiles for the Navy. At the plant's opening, Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai pushed for industrialization, stating that it was in "industrialization and the money and the jobs engendered thereby that the future of the Navajo people will lie." The plant started with 30 employees, growing to 224 by the end of 1969, but then dropping to 99 in 1971 due to a slowdown in the electronics industry. General Dynamics opened another Navajo plant near Farmington NM in 1988. Due to the end of the Cold War, Hughes Aircraft (part of General Motors) acquired General Dynamics' missile business in 1992 and sold it to Raytheon in 1997. The Fort Defiance facility was closed in 2002 when its parent company, Delphi Automotive Systems, moved out of the military wiring business. The Farmington plant remains open, now Raytheon Diné, building components for Tomahawk, Javelin, and AMRAAM missiles.

Inside the Fairchild 9040 integrated circuit

The integrated circuit die image in Fairchild's commemorative brochure has an exceptionally striking design and color scheme. It's clear why this chip brings weaving to mind. Studying the die photo of the 9040 carefully reveals some interesting characteristics of integrated circuit design, so I will go into some detail.

The chip was fabricated from a tiny square of silicon, which appears purple in the photograph. Different regions of the silicon die were treated (doped) with impurities to change the properties of the silicon and thus create electronic devices. These doped regions appear as green or blue lines. The white lines are the metal layer on top of the silicon, connecting the components. The 13 metal rectangles around the border are the bond pads. The chip was packaged in an unusual 13-pin flat-pack, as shown below. Each of the 13 bond pads above was connected by a tiny wire to one of the 13 external pins.

The Fairchild 9040 was introduced in the mid-1960s as part of Fairchild's Micrologic family, a set of high-performance integrated circuits that were designed to work together.13 The 9040 chip was a "flip-flop", a circuit capable of storing a single bit, a 0 or 1. Flip-flops can be combined to form counters, counting the number of pulses, for instance.

The most dramatic patterns on the chip are the intricate serpentine blue lines. Each line forms a resistor, controlling the flow of electricity by impeding its path. The lines must be long to provide the desired resistance, so they wind back and forth to fit into the available space. Each end of a resistor is connected to the metal layer, wiring it to another part of the circuit. Most of the die is occupied by resistors, which is a disadvantage of this type of circuit. Modern integrated circuits use a different type of circuitry (CMOS), which is much more compact, partly because it doesn't need bulky resistors.

Transistors are the main component of an integrated circuit. These tiny devices act as switches, turning signals on and off. The photo below shows one of the transistors in the 9040. It consists of three layers of silicon, with metal wiring connected to each layer. Note the blue region in the middle, surrounded by a slightly darker purple region; these color changes indicate that the silicon has been doped to change its properties. The green region surrounding the transistor provides isolation between this transistor and the other circuitry, so the transistors don't interfere with each other. The chip also has many diodes, which look similar to transistors except a diode has two connections.

These transistors with their three layers of silicon are a type known as bipolar. Modern computers use a different type of transistor, metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS), which is much more compact and efficient. One of Fairchild's major failures was staying with bipolar transistors too long, rather than moving to MOS.14 In a sense, the photo of the 9040 die shows the seeds of Fairchild's failure.

The 9040 chip was constructed on a completely different scale from the Pentium, showing the rapid progress of the IC industry. The 9040 contains just 16 transistors, while the Pentium contains 3.3 million transistors. Thus, individual transistors can be seen in the 9040 image, while only large-scale functional blocks are visible in the Pentium. This increasing transistor count illustrates the exponential growth in integrated circuit capacity between the 9040 in the mid-1960s and the Pentium in 1993. This growth pattern, with the number of transistors doubling about every two years, is known as Moore's law, since it was first observed in 1965 by Gordon Moore (one of Fairchild's "traitorous eight", who later started Intel).

The schematic below shows the circuitry inside the 9040 chip, with its 16 transistors, 16 diodes, and 22 resistors. The symmetry of the 9040 die photo makes it appealing, and that symmetry is reflected in the circuit below, with the left side and the right side mirror images. The idea behind a flip-flop is that it can hold either a 0 or a 1. In the chip, this is implemented by turning on the right side of the chip to hold a 0, or the left side to hold a 1. If one side of the chip is on, it forces the other side off, accomplished by the X-like crossings of signals in the center.15 Thus, the symmetry is not arbitrary, but is critical to the operation of the circuit.

Despite the obscurity of the 9040, multiple 9040 chips are currently on the Moon. The chip was used in the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP),16 in particular, the Active Seismic Experiment on Apollo 14 and 16. This experiment detonated small explosives on the Moon and measured the resulting seismic waves. The photo below is a detail from a blueprint17 that shows three of the nineteen 9040 flip-flops (labeled "FF") as well as two 9041 logic gates, a chip in the same family as the 9040.

Conclusions

The similarities between Navajo weavings and the patterns in integrated circuits have been described since the 1960s. Marilou Schultz's weavings of integrated circuits make these visual metaphors into concrete works of art. Although the Woven Histories exhibit at the National Gallery of Art is no longer on display, the exhibit will be at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) starting November 8, 2024, and the Museum of Modern Art (New York) starting April 20, 2025 (full dates here). If you're in the area, I recommend viewing the exhibit, but don't make my mistake: leave more than five minutes to see it!

Many thanks to Marilou Schultz for discussing her art with me. For more on her art, see A Conversation with Marilou Schultz on YouTube.18 Follow me on Mastodon as @kenshirriff@oldbytes.space or RSS for updates.

Notes and references

The Minuteman missile was introduced in 1962 as a key part of America's nuclear deterrent. The Minuteman III missile is currently the only US land-based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), with 400 missiles ready for launch, spread across five central states.1 The missile contains a precision guidance system, capable of delivering a warhead to a target 13,000 km away (8000 miles) with an accuracy of 200 meters (660 feet).

The diagram below shows the guidance system of the Minuteman III missile (1970). This guidance system contains over 17,000 electronic and mechanical parts, costing $510,000 (about $4.5 million in current dollars). The heart of the guidance system is the gyro stabilized platform, which uses gyroscopes and accelerometers to measure the missile's orientation and acceleration. The computer uses the measurements from the platform to determine the missile's position and guide the missile on its trajectory to the target. Other key components are the missile guidance set controller, which contains electronics to support the gyro stabilized platform, and the amplifier, which interfaces the computer with the rest of the missile. In this blog post, I take a close look at the components of the guidance system that was used until the early 2000s.2

Fundamentally, the guidance computer constantly compares the missile position to the desired trajectory and generates the appropriate steering commands to keep the missile on track.3 The diagram below shows how directing the engine nozzles causes the missile to rotate around its three axes: roll, pitch, and yaw.4 In the silo, the roll angle (the azimuth) is aligned with the direction to the target. The missile takes off vertically and then the missile gradually rotates along the pitch axis to tilt over toward the target. During flight, adjustments along all three axes keep the missile on target. The Minuteman III has four rocket stages so the guidance computer jettisons each rocket stage and ignites the next stage in sequence.

The guidance platform

The idea behind inertial navigation is to keep track of the missile's position by constantly measuring its acceleration. By integrating the acceleration, you get the velocity. And by integrating the velocity, you get the position. Inertial navigation is self-contained, a big advantage for a missile since the enemy can't jam your navigation. The hard part is measuring the acceleration and angles with extreme accuracy, since even tiny errors are multiplied as the missile travels.

In more detail, the Minuteman's inertial guidance is built around a gyroscopically stabilized platform, which is kept in a fixed orientation. The platform is mounted on two beryllium gimbals. Feedback from gyroscopes drives three torque motors to rotate the gimbals to keep the stable platform in exactly the same orientation no matter how the missile twists and turns.

The diagram below shows the components of the stable platform, in approximately the same orientation as the photo above. Three accelerometers are mounted on the stable platform to measure acceleration. The accelerometers are oriented along three perpendicular axes so each one measures acceleration along one axis. (The accelerometer axes are not aligned with the platform axes; this distributes the acceleration (mostly "up") across the accelerometers, increasing accuracy.) The two alignment mirrors allow the stable platform to be aligned with a precise device called an autocollimator, as will be described below. The gyrocompass uses the Earth's rotation to precisely determine North, providing a backup alignment technique. Both the alignment mirrors and the gyrocompass can be rotated to a precise angle, reported by the resolver.

To target a Minuteman I missile, the missile had to be physically rotated in the silo to be aligned with the target, an angle called the launch azimuth. This angle had to be extremely precise, since even a tiny angle error will be greatly magnified over the missile's journey. Aligning the missile was a tedious process that used the North Star to determine North. Since the star was not visible from inside the silo, a complex surveying technique was used, using a surveyor's theodolite to measure the angles between the North Star and three concrete monuments outside the silo. Inside the silo, the closest monument was visible through a sighting tube, allowing the precise angle measurement to be transferred to the silo. After many more measurements inside the silo, a special device called an autocollimator was positioned precisely 90° from the desired launch azimuth. The autocollimator shot a beam of light through a window in the side of the missile, where it bounced off a mirror on the stable platform and returned to the autocollimator. If the returning beam wasn't exactly parallel, the autocollimator sent a signal to the missile, causing the stable platform to rotate as needed. The result of this process was that the stable platform was exactly aligned with the desired angle to the target.5

The guidance platform was completely redesigned for Minuteman II and III, eliminating the time-consuming alignment that Minuteman I required. The new platform had an alignment block with rotating mirrors. Instead of rotating the missile, the autocollimator remained fixed in the East position and the mirror (and thus the stable platform) was rotated to the desired launch azimuth. The new guidance platform also added a gyrocompass under the alignment block, a special compass that could precisely align itself to North by precessing against the Earth's rotation. At first, the gyrocompass was used as a backup check against the autocollimator, but eventually the gyrocompass became the primary alignment. For calibration, the alignment block also includes electrolytic bubble levels to position the stable platform in known orientations with respect to local gravity.6

The photo above shows the alignment block on top of the gyrocompass. The front and back of the block are the precision mirrors that reflect the light beam from the autocollimator. The circles on top of the block and at the right are two level detectors, with set screws for exact adjustment. The platform has four level detectors, allowing it to be aligned against gravity in multiple positions. Like the gimbals, the gyrocompass assembly is made of beryllium due to its rigidity and light weight; it has a warning sticker because beryllium is highly toxic.

The diagram below shows how the axes align with the gimbals of the stable platform.7 Note the window at the top of the photo. Light from the autocollimator shines in through the window, reflects off the mirror on the alignment block, and returns through the window to the autocollimator. The autocollimator detects any error in alignment and signals the guidance system to correct its position accordingly.

The stable platform uses gyroscopes to maintain its fixed orientation as the missile turns. The idea behind a gyroscope is that a spinning disk will tend to maintain its spin axis. The problem is that any friction, even from precision ball bearings, will reduce the accuracy. The solution in the Minuteman is a "gas bearing", where the gyroscope rotor is supported by an extremely thin layer of hydrogen. As shown below, the gyroscope is built around a stationary marble-sized ball (blue), fastened to the gyroscope frame at the top and bottom. The rotor (pink) is clamped around the equator of the ball and spins at high speed, powered by an induction motor (windings green, rotor yellow). If the gyroscope frame is tilted, the rotor will stay in its orientation. The resulting change in angle between the frame and the rotor is detected by sensitive capacitive pickups (purple). The gyroscope is sensitive to tilt in two axes: left-right, and front-back. Since nothing touches the rotor except the thin layer of gas around the ball, the influence of friction is minimal.

A gas-bearing gyroscope has the problem that when it starts or stops, the gas layer dissipates, allowing the rotor and the bearing to rub. The Minuteman missile's guidance system was kept continuously running, so starts and stops were infrequent. Moreover, when the gyroscope did need to be started, the electronics gave it a 40-volt jolt to get it up to speed quickly. Because the Minuteman's guidance system was always running—and its solid-fuel engines didn't require fueling—the missile could be launched in under a minute.

To summarize the guidance trajectory, a Minuteman flight is typically about 35 minutes,8 but only the first few minutes are powered by the rockets; the warheads coast most of the way on a ballistic trajectory. The first three rocket stages are active for just 180 seconds; this completed the boost phase for Minuteman I and II. However, the innovation of Minuteman III was that it held three warheads, a system called MIRV (Multiple Independently-targeted Reentry Vehicles). To direct these warheads to their targets, Minuteman III has a fourth stage, called PSRE (Propulsion System Rocket Engine), mounted just below the guidance system. The PSRE was active for 440 seconds, directing each warhead on its specific path. (Meanwhile, a retro-rocket sent the third stage in a random direction. Otherwise, it would tag along with the warheads, acting as a giant radar beacon for enemy anti-ballistic-missile systems.) The warheads travel very high, typically over 800 nautical miles (1500 km), more than three times the altitude of the International Space Station. As for the multiple-warhead MIRV, the Minuteman III missiles were converted back to single warheads as part of the New START arms reduction treaty, with the last MIRV removed in June 2014.

The Minuteman D-17B computer

The guidance computer has a key role in the Minuteman missile, determining the missile's position from the stable platform data, executing a guidance algorithm, and steering the missile on the desired trajectory. Before explaining the D-37 computer used in Minuteman II and III, I'll start by discussing the D-17B computer used in the first Minuteman, since its characteristics strongly influenced the later computers. The Minuteman I computer was very primitive by modern standards. Although it was a 24-bit machine, it was a serial computer, operating on one bit at a time. The big advantage of serial processing is that it dramatically reduces the hardware requirements. Since the computer only processes one bit at a time, it uses a one-bit ALU. Moreover, the buses and datapaths are one bit wide rather than 24 bits. The disadvantage, of course, is that a serial computer is slow; the D-17B took 27 clock cycles (24 bits and three overhead) to perform any operation. At best, the computer could perform 12,800 additions per second.

The computer has an unusual cylindrical structure, 29 inches (74 cm) in diameter, designed to fit the diameter of the Minuteman missile. The computer itself is the bottom half of the cylindrical shell. The top half is the electronic equipment chassis, holding the power supplies for the computer and the stable platform, as well as servo control amplifiers, oscillators, and converters.

The computer doesn't have any RAM. Instead, all instructions, data, and registers are stored on a hard disk, but not like a modern hard disk. The disk has separate, fixed heads for each track so it can access tracks without seeking. (This approach is similar to a computer built around drum memory, except the drum is flattened.) In total, the disk held just 2727 24-bit words (approximately 8 Kbytes). The computer's serial processing and its disk-based storage worked well together. The disk provided data one bit at a time, which the computer would process serially. The results were written back to the disk, one bit at a time as calculation proceeded. The write head was positioned just behind the read head so a value could be overwritten as it was computed.

The photo below shows the numerous read and write heads for the D-17B's hard disk. Note that the heads are fixed (unlike modern hard drives), and the heads are widely distributed across the surface. (There is no need for different tracks to be aligned.) I believe that the green and white heads in pairs are for the "regular" tracks, while the heads with other spacings implement registers and short-term storage called loops.9

The D-17B computer was transistorized. The photo below shows one of its circuit boards, crammed with transistors (the black cylinders), resistors, diodes, and other components. (This board is a read amplifier, amplifying the signals from the hard disk.) The computer used diode-resistor logic and diode-transistor logic to minimize the number of transistors; as a result, it used 6282 diodes and 5094 resistors compared to 1521 silicon and germanium transistors (source).

The computer supported 39 instructions. Many of the instructions are straightforward: add, subtract, multiply (but no divide), complement, magnitude, AND, left shift, and right shift. The computer handled 24-bit words as well as 11-bit split words, so many of these instructions had "split" versions to operate on a shorter value. One unusual instruction was "split compare and limit", which replaced the accumulator value with a limit value from memory, if the accumulator value exceeded the limit.

The focus of the computer was I/O with 48 digital inputs, 26 incremental inputs, 28 digital outputs, 12 analog voltage outputs, and 3 pulse outputs for gyro control. The computer had special instructions to support the various inputs and outputs.10 For example, to integrate pulse signals from the stable platform, the computer had instructions to enter and exit "Fine Countdown" mode, which caused two special registers to operate as digital integrators, in parallel with regular computation (details).

The D-37 computer

For the Minuteman II missile, Autonetics built the D-37 computer, one of the earliest integrated circuit computers. By using integrated circuits, the guidance computer was dramatically shrunk, increasing range, functionality, and accuracy. The photo below compares the size of the older D-17B computer (half-cylinder) with the D-37B (held by the engineer).

Although the main task of the computer is guidance, with the increased capacity of the D-37, the computer took over many of the tasks formerly performed by ground support equipment. The D-37 managed "ground control and checkout, monitoring, communication coding and decoding, as well as the airborne tasks of navigation, guidance, steering, and control" (link).

The D-37 had several models. The D-37A was the prototype system, while the D-37B was deployed in the first 60 Minuteman II missiles. The Air Force soon realized that nuclear radiation posed a threat to the computer, so they developed the radiation-hardened D-37C.11 The Minuteman III used the D-37D, an improved and slightly larger version. Even with additional disk space, program memory was so tight that software features were dropped to save just 47 words.

As far as architecture and performance, the D-37 computer is almost the same as the D-17B, but extended. Most importantly, the D-37 kept the serial architecture of the D-17B, so it had the same slow instruction speed. The D-37 kept the instruction set of the D-17B, with additional instructions such as division, logical OR, bit rotates, and more I/O, giving it 58 instructions versus 39 in the older computer. It expanded the hard disk storage, but with a double-sided disk providing 7222 words of storage in the D37-C.12 The D-37 included division implemented in hardware (which the D-17B didn't have), along with a faster hardware implementation of multiplication, improving the speed of those instructions.13 The D-37C added more I/O lines, as well as radio input and 32 analog voltage inputs.

The diagram below shows the D-37C computer, used in the Minuteman II. At the left is the hard disk that provides the computer's memory. Most of the computer is occupied by complex circuit boards covered with flat-pack integrated circuits. At the right is the advanced switching power supply, generating numerous voltages for the computer (±3, 6, 9, 12, 18, and 24 volts). The connectors at the top provide the interface between the computer and the rest of the system. Because the computer has so many digital (discrete) and analog signals, it uses multiple 61-pin connectors (details).

The D-37C computer was built from 22 different integrated circuits, custom-built by Texas Instruments for the Minuteman project. These chips ranged from digital functions such as NAND gates and a flip-flop to linear amplifiers to specialized functions such as a demodulator/chopper. Texas Instruments sold the Minuteman series integrated circuits on the open market, but the chips were spectacularly expensive ($55 for a flip-flop, over $500 in current dollars) and not as popular as TI's general-purpose integrated circuits.14 The circuit boards were very complex for the time, with 10 interconnected layers. Each board was about 4 × 5½ inches and held about 150 flatpack integrated circuits, with components on both sides.

The growth of the integrated circuit industry owes a lot to the Minuteman computer and the Apollo Guidance Computer, both developed during the early days of the integrated circuit. These projects bought integrated circuits by the hundreds of thousands, helping the IC industry move from low-volume prototypes to mass-produced commodities, both by providing demand and by motivating companies to fix yield problems. Moreover, both computers required high-reliability integrated circuits, forcing the industry to improve its manufacturing processes. Finally, Minuteman and Apollo gave integrated circuits credibility, showing that ICs were a practical design choice.

The Minuteman III used the D-37D computer, which had about twice the disk capacity, 14,137 words. The layout is similar to the D-37C above, with the disk drive on the left and the power supply on the right. Since the computer is mounted "upside down", the boards are not visible inside, blocked by the interconnect board.15 Note the use of flexible PCBs, advanced technology for the time, soldered with low-melting-point indium/tin solder.

By 1970, the D-37 computer had made the cylindrical D-17B obsolete. The government gave away surplus D-17B computers to universities and other organizations for use as general-purpose microcomputers. Dozens of organizations, from Harvard to the Center for Disease Control to Tektronix jumped at the chance to obtain a free computer, even if it was slow and difficult to use, forming a large users group to share programming tips.

The P92 amplifier

The amplifier provides the interface between the computer and the rest of the missile. The amplifier sends control signals to the missile's four stages, controlling the engines and steering. (The electronic circuitry from the Minuteman I's nozzle control units was moved to the amplifier, simplifying maintenance.) Moreover, the Minuteman has explosive ordnance in many places, ranging from small squibs that activate valves to explosives that separate the missile stages. The amplifier sends the high-current (30 amp) signals to detonate the ordnance, while monitoring the current to detect faults.16 The amplifier acts as a safety device for the ordnance, blocking signals unless the amplifier has been armed with the proper code. The amplifier sends control signals to the reentry system (i.e. the warheads) as well as the chaff dispenser, which emits clouds of wires to jam enemy radar. The amplifier also sends and receives signals through the umbilical cable from the ground equipment.

The photo above shows the amplifier with its cover removed. The amplifier is constructed as two stacks of six circuit boards, on top of a double-width power supply board. At the top and bottom of each board, connectors with thick cables connect the boards to the rest of the system. Each board is a multi-layer printed-circuit board built on a thick magnesium frame for cooling. The amplifier has five power switching boards, a valve driver board, three servo amplifier boards, and an ACTR control board (whatever that is). The system board is visible on the left, with large capacitors and precision 0.01% resistors. To its right is the decoder board, presumably decoding computer commands to select a particular I/O device. Note the extensive use of Texas Instruments flat-pack integrated circuits on this board, the tiny white rectangles.

Missile Guidance Set Control

The Missile Guidance Set Control (MGSC) contains the electronics to power and run the inertial measurement unit (IMU), providing the interface to the computer. The MGSC handles the platform servo loop, accelerometer server loops, gyroscope torquing, gyrocompass torquing and slew, and accelerometer temperature control.17 One unexpected function of the MGSC is powering the computer's hard disk, supplying 400 Hz, 3-phase power at 27.25 volts (source).

The MGSC is constructed from hinged metal modules, each with a particular function, shown above. The modules are constructed around printed circuit boards. Two large connectors at the right of the MGSC provide electrical connectivity with the IMU and computer. At the top and bottom of the MGSC are connections for coolant. The MGSC is roughly equivalent to the top half of the Minuteman I's cylindrical guidance system, opposite the computer half. The MGSC is unchanged between the Minuteman II and Minuteman III. The MGSC is normally covered with a metal cover that provides radiation protection, but the cover is missing in the photo above.

Battery

The battery in the Minuteman Guidance System is very unusual, since it is a "reserve battery", completely inert until activated. It is a silver/zinc battery with the electrolyte stored separately, giving the battery an essentially infinite shelf life. To power up the battery during a launch, a gas generator inside the battery is ignited by a squib. The gas pressure forces the potassium hydroxide electrolyte out of a tank and into the battery, energizing the battery in under a second. The battery can only be used once, of course, and you can't test it. The battery was built by Delco-Remy (a division of General Motors) (details). It provides 28 volts at 14.5 Amp-hours, powering the guidance system and most of the missile; a separate battery powers the first-stage rocket.

The photo above shows the battery mounted inside the guidance system. Note the two thin wires attached to the posts on the left front of the battery to enable the battery, and the thick power wires bolted to the posts on the right. Above these posts is an "electrolyte vent port"; I'm not sure what prevents caustic electrolyte from spraying out under high pressure.

The photo below shows the construction of a Minuteman I battery, similar but with two independent battery blocks. The two round gas generators on the front of the electrolyte tube force the electrolyte into the battery sections.

Squib-activated switch

Another unusual component is the squib-activated switch. This switch is activated by a small explosive squib; when fired, the squib forces the switch to change positions. This switch may seem excessively dramatic, but it has a few advantages over, say, an electromagnetic relay. The squib-activated switch will switch solidly, while the contacts on a relay may "chatter" or bounce before settling into their new positions. An electromagnetic relay may require more current to switch, especially if it has large contacts or many contacts. However, like the battery, the squib-activated switch can only be used once.

The purpose of the switch is to disconnect important signals, known as critical leads, during launch. The Minuteman missile has an umbilical connection that provides power, cooling, and signals while the missile is in the silo. Just before the umbilical cable is disconnected, the switch severs the connections for the master reset signal along with an enable and disable signal. Presumably, these control signals are cleanly disconnected to avoid stray signals or electrical noise that could cause problems when the umbilical connection is pulled off.

The photo below shows the umbilical cable connected to a Minuteman II missile in its silo. Also note the window in the side of the missile to allow the light beam from the autocollimator to reflect off the guidance platform for alignment.

Cooling

The guidance system is water-cooled while in the silo, using a solution of sodium chromate to inhibit corrosion. After launch, the guidance system operated for just a few minutes before releasing the warheads, so it operated without water cooling. (The stable platform has a fan and heat exchanger to keep it cool during flight.) The diagram below highlights the cooling lines. Coolant is provided from the ground support equipment through the umbilical connector in the upper right. It flows through the computer, diode assembly, MGSC, and stable platform. Finally, the coolant exits through the umbilical connector.

Diode assembly

In the middle of the guidance system, the diode assembly consists of seven power diodes. These diodes control the power flow when switching from ground power to battery power. The photo below shows the diode assembly, with coolant connections at the top and bottom. The thick gray wire in the center of the diode assembly receives power from the battery just to the left.

Permutation plug

The Permutation plug (or P-plug) was the key cryptographic element of the guidance system, defining the launch codes for a particular missile. The P-plug looked similar to a hockey puck and plugged into a 55-pin socket attached to the amplifier. The retaining bar held the P-plug in place.

Because the security of the missile hinged on the P-plug, the P-plug was handled in a highly ritualized way, transported by a two-person team, an airman and an officer, both armed (source). After the guidance system underwent maintenance, the P-plug team would ensure that the plug was properly installed, just before the missile was bolted back together. There was also a lot of ritual around the disk memory, since it held security codes and targeting information.18 Before anyone could work on the computer, a special team would come to the silo and erase the memory. Afterward, another team would load up the computer from a magnetic tape (in the case of Minuteman III) or punched tape (earlier).19

The missile launch codes are said to be split between the hard disk and the permutation plug. In particular, the missile software holds a two-word code for each of the five launch control facilities.22 The launch code in an Execute Launch Command (ELC) must match the combination of the P-plug value and the site-specific value on disk.23 Thus, the launch code is unique to each launch control site and each missile.24 As another security feature, a launch requires messages from two launch control sites, unless only one was available.25

Transient current detector

A nuclear blast has many bad effects on semiconductors and can cause transient errors. A rather brute-force approach was used to minimize this risk in the D-37C and D-37D computers: if a nuclear blast is detected, the computer stops writing to disk until the burst of radiation passes by. When the radiation level drops, the computer carries on from where it left off, extrapolating to make up for the lost time26 to minimize the error. Since all data is stored on the hard disk, the system doesn't need to worry about memory corruption as could happen with semiconductor RAM.

The Minuteman documents euphemistically refer to "operating in a hostile environment" for the ability to handle large pulses of radiation from a nearby nuclear explosion. Another euphemism is "seismic environment", when a nuclear blast near a silo could disturb the missile's targeting alignment. To get an idea of the expected forces, note that the launch officers were strapped into their seats with four-point harnesses to protect against the seismic environment.27

The "transient current detector" above detects dangerous levels of radiation. I couldn't find any details, but I suspect that it contains a semiconductor and detects transient current through the semiconductor induced by radiation. It would make sense to use a semiconductor similar to the ones in the computer so the detector's response matches the response of the computer, perhaps a matching Texas Instruments IC.

The Minuteman III also has two "field detectors" mounted on the outside of the guidance ring. These presumably detect large fluctuations in the electromagnetic field, indicating an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), different from the ionizing radiation picked up by the Transient Current Detector.

Conclusions

The Minuteman guidance system is full of innovative technologies. Among other things, Minuteman I used an early transistorized computer, and Minuteman II used one of the first integrated circuit computers. The Minuteman missile isn't just something from the past, though. There are currently 400 Minuteman missiles in the United States, ready to launch at a moment's notice and create global devastation. Thus, its technical achievements can't be glorified without reflecting on the negativity of its underlying purpose. On the other hand, Minuteman has succeeded (so far) in its purpose of deterrence, so it can also be viewed in a positive, peacekeeping role. In any case, the Minuteman technology is morally ambiguous, compared to, say, the Apollo Guidance Computer.

I plan to write more about the role of Minuteman and Apollo in the IC industry, so follow me on Mastodon as @kenshirriff@oldbytes.space or RSS for updates. Probably the best overview of Minuteman is Minuteman weapon system history and description. The book Minuteman: A technical history has thorough information. For information on the missile targeting and alignment process, see Association of Air Force Missileers Newsletter, December 2006. The Minuteman guidance system is described in detail in The evolution of Minuteman guidance and control. Much of the imagery in this article is from the National Air and Space Museum. Thanks to Martin Miller for providing a detailed D-37C photo. He has taken amazing photos of nuclear equipment, published in his book Weapons of Mass Destruction: Specters of the Nuclear Age, so check it out.

Notes and references

The Space Shuttle contained a bulky printer so the astronauts could receive procedures, mission plans, weather reports, crew activity plans, and other documents. Needed for the first Shuttle launch in 1981, this printer was designed in just 7 months, built around an Army communications terminal. Unlike modern printers, the Shuttle's printer contains a spinning metal drum with raised characters, allowing it to rapidly print a line at a time.

This printer is known as the Space Shuttle Interim Teleprinter System.1 As the name "Interim" suggests, this printer was intended as a stop-gap measure, operating for a few flights until a better printer was operational. However, the teleprinter proved to be more reliable than its replacement, so it remained in use as a backup for over 50 flights, often printing thousands of lines per flight. This didn't come cheap: with a Shuttle flight costing $27,000 per pound, putting the 59-pound teleprinter in space cost over $1.5 million per flight.

We obtained access to a Shuttle teleprinter (probably a development system that remained on the ground) and wanted to put it into operation. I had to reverse engineer three of the boards inside the printer to determine the data format the printer accepted: serial data encoded into audio. But after analyzing the printer and performing a lot of maintenance, we succeeded in getting the printer to print. In this article, I'll describe the Shuttle's Interim Teleprinter, explain its circuitry and drum-based printing mechanism, and show it in operation.

History of the Shuttle's Interim Teleprinter

The motivation for the teleprinter goes back to the Apollo program. During Apollo missions, the only way to send information to the astronauts was by talking to them over the radio and having the astronauts write down the data. NASA decided that the Space Shuttle should include a mechanism to send text and images to the astronauts, a 78-pound, high-tech fax machine called the Uplink Text & Graphics System (TAGS). A high-resolution grayscale image was sent to the Shuttle as a digital data stream. Onboard the Shuttle, a squat CRT displayed the image one line at a time and a fiber-optic faceplate transferred each line to light-sensitive silver emulsion paper. The paper was developed by passing it over a hot roller at 260ºF for 25 seconds, creating a permanent image.

The one flaw in this plan was that sending the digital image to the Shuttle required the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRS), which due to delays wouldn't be ready until the sixth Shuttle flight. (The TDRS was a space-based replacement for the worldwide network of ground stations that was used during Apollo.) As a result, NASA decided just seven months before the first Shuttle launch that they needed an interim system "for transmission of real-time, flight-plan changes and other operational data to the crew."2

The Shuttle teleprinter is the result of this rushed effort to create a printer that could work over the existing audio channel rather than the digital TDRS satellite. Due to the time pressure, the Shuttle teleprinter needed to be based on an off-the-shelf printer. Thermal and electrostatic printers were rejected due to toxicity and flammability problems. (The Shuttle teleprinter used a roll of yellowish paper, which required a NASA waiver due to its flammability, a concern ever since the Apollo-1 disaster).

The decision was made to use a military communications terminal, the the AN/UGC-743 "Tactical Teletype". The terminal's interfacing was very flexible, supporting serial data in either ASCII or Baudot format, with multiple configurations and baud rates (up to 1200 baud), using either a current-loop or voltage signals. The military terminal supported two-way communication, so it had a keyboard. Remarkably, the terminal also implemented a word processor, controlled by a Motorola 6800 microprocessor (ancestor of the famous MOS 6502). The word processor allowed messages to be composed offline, minimizing the radio transmission time, which was important in a hostile environment. As will be seen, this 100-pound military system required many large changes to be usable on the Space Shuttle, most visibly removing the keyboard.

The printing mechanism

The teleprinter uses a spinning drum with raised characters, shown below.4 To print a character, the printer fires a hammer, forcing the inked ribbon and paper against the raised character on the drum. The drum is 80 characters wide, matching the line length, and there are 80 corresponding hammers, one for each print position. The drum has 64 printable characters, wrapped around each position of the drum.

The printer prints a line at a time, not instantaneously, but during each revolution of the drum. When the drum makes one complete revolution, each of the 64 characters passes by each print position once. Printing requires precise timing of the hammers to strike the right character on the drum as it whizzes by. The printer control circuitry triggers each hammer at the proper time, when the desired character on the drum is lined up with the hammer, producing the desired text.5

The character set is slightly different between the military printer and the Shuttle printer. The military drum had 64 ASCII characters (upper-case letters only, numbers, and special characters). The drum doesn't contain an explicit space character, since nothing is printed for a space. In its place, the drum has a diamond "◊", used as a special character to indicate a parity error or other error. The drum for the Shuttle teleprinter replaces 10 ASCII special characters with symbols that are more useful to the Shuttle, such as Greek letters for angles. Specifically, the characters ;@[\]^!"#$ are replaced by θ✓‾↑↓~αβΔϕ.

The video below shows a closeup of the hammers as they strike the paper to print text. The text is the teleprinter's built-in test message: "THE LAZY YELLOW DOG WAS CAUGHT BY THE SLOW RED FOX AS HE LAY SLEEPING IN THE SUN". This test message is based on the traditional quick brown fox..., which is a pangram, containing all 26 letters, but the teleprinter's test sentence is missing J, K, M, Q, and V. However, the test message is exactly 80 characters long and replaces spaces with the diamond "◊", so it is effective for verifying that all 80 columns work.

The electronics

The photo below shows the circuitry inside the teleprinter, looking down from above. At the left are the three interface boards, custom boards that demodulate the incoming audio signal. In front of the interface boards are large inductors to filter the incoming power. Hidden beneath them, a solid-state relay controls the power to the rest of the printer, implementing the low-power standby mode. In the middle, the blue board is the surprisingly complex switching power supply, mounted on a thick metal plate for cooling. Normally, the large roll of paper is mounted above the power supply board. At the right, four large circuit boards implement the main logic of the printer: a printer driver board, a communications board, a memory board, and the processor board. The rotating drum is protected by the perforated black metal grill at the front.

The demodulator boards

The original military teleprinter received data as a serial bitstream. However, on the Space Shuttle, data was encoded as frequencies on the audio link. Three custom boards were constructed to demodulate the audio data so the rest of the printer could handle it. These boards also performed Shuttle-specific tasks such as powering up the printer when a message comes in, and then returning the printer to standby mode. I reverse-engineered these boards to determine how they work and to determine the data encoding. (Schematics are in the footnotes.7) In this section, I'll discuss these three boards, which are on the left side of the printer.

To summarize, the serial bitstream is encoded with Frequency Shift Keying, with a 1 represented by 3600 Hz and a 0 represented by 7200 Hz.6 The serial data is transmitted at 600 baud, even parity, one stop bit. The demodulation process first converts the input audio to a digital signal by thresholding it. (That is, the input sine wave is converted to a square wave.) The digital signal is autocorrelated to distinguish the 3600 Hz and 7200 Hz signals, recovering the underlying serial data. This signal is passed to the printer's logic boards (part of the original military teleprinter), which convert the serial signal to ASCII bytes and prints them.

Signal processing starts with the "FSK input" board, shown below. First, it amplifies the input audio signal. (The two large resistors provide a 600 Ω load for the audio input.) Next, a 900 Hz high-pass filter eliminates low-frequency noise. (The filter is implemented by a two-stage Sallen-Key topology.)

The signal bounces from board to board, going to the "output FSK demod" board next. This board has a carrier-detect circuit that turns on the rest of the printer if it detects an input signal. This allows the printer to sit idle until it receives a signal from Earth. This board also applies the threshold to the signal to turn it into a digital waveform, which goes to the "control" board.

The output board also holds the 5-volt and 12-volt linear regulators that power the three boards; these are the metal-can ICs at the bottom of the board. To reduce the load on the regulators, two large resistors drop the input voltage (28 volts) to a lower level before it is regulated.

The control board holds the FSK decoder, an interesting circuit that converts the two FSK frequencies to binary by implementing a digital auto-correlator. It uses a 64-bit shift register to delay the digital input by 139 µs. The input and the delayed input are XOR'd together, generating a result that depends on the frequency. A 7200 Hz signal repeats every 139 µs, so the input and the delayed input match, yielding 0 from the XOR. However, a 3600 Hz square wave switches state every 139 µs, so the two XOR inputs will always differ, resulting in a 1 output. Thus, the circuit cleanly distinguishes between a 3600 Hz input and a 7200 Hz input.

The digital demodulator avoids some of the problems of an analog FSK demodulator. It is not sensitive to signal levels, since the signal is converted to digital. The digital demodulator is also not sensitive to harmonics, which can cause problems with analog demodulators. Finally, it doesn't require the carefully-tuned filters of an analog circuit.

The demodulated signal passes from the control board back to the output board. This board applies a 400 Hz low-pass filter and then a threshold to convert the signal back to binary. If the input frequencies are not exact, the demodulator will produce the correct 0 or 1 value over most of the waveform, but there will be glitches at the edges. The low-pass filter removes these glitches. (You might be concerned that a 600-baud signal would be wiped out by a 400 Hz low-pass filter. However, the worst case signal (alternating 0's and 1's) would be 300 Hz because it takes two bits to make one cycle, so the filter has plenty of margin.) Next, the board blocks the signal unless a carrier is detected. This ensures that random noise isn't demodulated and printed. Finally, the serial binary signal leaves the custom Shuttle boards and goes to the teleprinter's communication board, part of the standard teleprinter.

I noticed two unusual things about these boards. First, they have some modifications: "bodge" wires and added components. Second, the boards are not conformal coated, which is unusual for aerospace boards. (The four logic cards, in comparison, are protected with conformal coating.) My hypothesis is that these boards were development boards, early in the design process of the Shuttle teleprinter, so they were modified as the design changed. The teleprinter is also marked "Not for flight", which supports this theory.

The logic cards

The military teleprinter contained four logic circuit cards: a CPU card, a memory card, a communications card, and a print control card, mounted at the right rear of the teleprinter. These cards are used unchanged in the Shuttle teleprinter.

The circuitry is more complex than you might expect, with four large cards full of ICs. There are several reasons for this. First, the cards use 1970s microprocessor technology, so it takes a lot of circuitry to do anything. In particular, many simple 7400-series logic chips perform "glue" functions: decoding addresses, buffering data, latching signals, and so forth. Moreover, a drum printer is inherently complicated, since 80 hammers must be driven at the right time based on the desired characters. Third, the teleprinter is very flexible, supporting multiple signal levels and two character formats (ASCII and Baudot). Most surprisingly, the teleprinter implements a word processor, allowing messages to be composed and edited offline. Of course, since the Shuttle's teleprinter is only used to receive data, and doesn't even have a keyboard, the word processor feature is entirely useless.

The CPU card

The CPU card holds the microprocessor that controls the teleprinter. Its most important function is to convert a line of ASCII characters into print drum codes. These codes are stored in memory for use by the print control card. The CPU also implements configuration and self-test functions.

The diagram below shows some of the main components. The CPU card contains a Motorola 6800 CPU, 4 kilobytes of memory, and a ROM that holds its program code.8 Inconveniently, all the IC part numbers are military numbers so it takes some investigation to determine what a part really is. The MC6822 is a Peripheral Interface Adapter, a Motorola chip that provides two parallel I/O ports. This chip is used on three of the cards to support a variety of I/O tasks. On the CPU card, the I/O ports drive eight status lamps (most of which were removed for the Shuttle teleprinter) as well as internal status signals such as "paper low" or "keyboard present" and the baud rate setting input.

The print control card

In a sense, the print control card is the heart of the printer, since it causes characters to be printed by firing hammers against the rotating drum. As the drum goes through one revolution, all 64 characters will spin past each of the 80 print positions. By firing hammers at the exact time, the card prints a line of text.9 In more detail, for each row on the drum, the printer card scans through the 80-character memory buffer using Direct Memory Access (DMA). If the value in memory matches the current drum row number, the hammer is fired. Note that the hammers don't fire simultaneously, but in sequence as memory is scanned.

The diagram above shows the interaction between the drum, the print control card, and the 80 hammers. The hammers are implemented on 20 print hammer cards, each with 4 hammers. Electrically, the hammers are arranged in a matrix. One wire out of 20 (S1-S20) selects the hammer board, the group of four. Another wire selects one of four hammers (Col 1-4). This approach simplifies the electronics, since 20 + 4 driver circuits and wires are used, rather than 80 (one for each column). The print control card is synchronized to the drum by two photo-transistor sensors that detect the drum's position. One sensor is triggered on each row, while the other sensor triggers once per revolution.

The print control card is shown below, with the main functional blocks labeled. The large purple-and-gold chip is the PIA, the same I/O chip that appeared on the CPU card. It handles a variety of signals such as the self-test request, paper out, and the drum stop signal. The mode control logic generates timing signals depending on the printer's mode. The data compare logic increments the row counter on each drum pulse, and compares the row counter to the value read from memory.10 The hammer driver circuitry on the left selects one of the 20 hammer cards, while the hammer driver circuitry on the right selects one of four hammers. The ribbon circuitry raises and lowers the ribbon so the ribbon doesn't block the text when the printer is idle. The line feed circuitry advances the paper for a line feed operation.

The photo below shows one of the hammer cards, with four hammers. Each hammer has an electromagnet that pulls a lever, rotating the hammer wheel, and causing the hammer to strike the paper. (The hammers themselves are in the upper right of the photo.) A screw adjustment controls the distance between each hammer and the paper, allowing precise adjustment of the timing. (Marc had to carefully adjust all the hammers to make the print quality readable.)

The communication card

The communication card handles the teleprinter's serial data input. The key chip is the 8251A, a USART (Universal Synchronous/Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter). This complex chip performs the conversion between the serial data stream and the bytes that the processor uses. (Note that the military teleprinter both sent and received serial data, while the Shuttle teleprinter only receives data.) The chip has a few support chips, labeled "UART" in the diagram below. The board has another Peripheral Interface Adapter chip, providing two I/O ports. These ports have functions such as reading the serial line settings (ASCII vs. Baudot, odd or even parity, number of stop bits, and current loop levels).

The board also has circuitry to generate the clock pulses for the selected baud rate. The mode circuitry handles various phases of transmit/receive. The filter/demod circuitry handles different input types, digitally filtering and demodulating as necessary.11

The memory card

The memory card supports the word-processing feature. It provides additional RAM to hold the text buffer as well as the ROM holding the software for editing. The 16 DRAM chips on the left (MK4027) provide 8 KB of RAM while the two ROM chips on the right provide 8K of ROM. The chips in the middle to the right of the resistors split the 12 address bits into row and column addresses as required by the RAM chips. The address signals go through the numerous 24 Ω resistors in the middle; I don't know why. According to the manual, the printer operates fine without this card, except without the word processor. Since the word processor was irrelevant to the Shuttle, I wonder why this card wasn't removed to reduce weight.

The power supply

The power supply board (shown earlier) implements separate power supplies for different parts of the printer.12 The supplies are implemented as switching power supplies, which were not as common at the time as now. The microprocessor supply provides +5V, +12V, and -5V, voltages required by memory chips in the 1970s. A separate switching power supply provides +5V, -8.6V, and +8.6V for the keyboard, dustcover, and interface module, components that were removed for the Shuttle teleprinter. Another supply powers the printer's status lamps.

The drum motor supply is important because its voltage is regulated to control the rotational speed of the drum. A sensor on the drum provides a feedback pulse for each row on the drum. (I think the drum speed is 868 RPM.) These pulses control the drum motor's switching supply. If the drum spins too slowly, the voltage is increased, and similarly if it spins too fast.

The hammers have an unusual constant-current power supply. When the printer is active, this power supply generates +18 V. However, the power supply is designed to use a constant current of 600 mA regardless of the hammer activity. A capacitor provides a reservoir of power that is filled by the constant current. If the hammers are using less current, the excess current is bled off through a resistor. The purpose of this is "to mask printing intelligence during periods of message traffic." In other words, if you used a teleprinter in the embassy in Moscow, for instance, spies could monitor power transients to see when hammers are firing, and perhaps figure out what is being printed. By keeping the current constant, this source of intelligence is blocked. Of course, this feature is useless on the Space Shuttle and only wastes power.

The military teleprinter accepted multiple input voltages: 22-30 VDC, 115 VAC, or 230 VAC, along with a 12 VDC battery backup. The transformers and diodes to support these voltages were part of the interface module that was removed for the Shuttle teleprinter. Instead, the Shuttle teleprinter is powered by 28 VDC.

Mechanical changes

The military teleprinter underwent significant mechanical changes to make it suitable for the Shuttle. These changes reduced its weight from 100 pounds to 59 pounds. The most visible change to the printer is the removal of the keyboard. The entire front section of the printer was replaced, removing the controls that were not needed in the Shuttle.13 The rugged frame of the original printer was replaced with a lighter-weight (but still substantial) frame. Horizontal rails were added to the frame to support the printer in the Shuttle locker.

The photo below shows the front of the Shuttle teleprinter. While the military teleprinter had numerous lights and switches on the front, the Shuttle teleprinter has just two lights and four switches.

NASA was concerned that the temperature of the teleprinter could become hazardous to the astronauts. To mitigate this danger, the teleprinter had a large heat-sensitive warning sticker. The yellow sticker on the left of the teleprinter changes color and displays an image if it heats up: it shows a bandaged hand and the word "HOT". Above it is an "Omegalabel" temperature monitoring sticker that shows the highest temperature the device reached. There are more of these stickers inside the teleprinter on various motors.

The Interim Teleprinter inside the Space Shuttle

The teleprinter was too large to be mounted on the flight deck, so it was mounted in a storage locker on the middeck, one level lower. The photo below shows the location of the locker that held the teleprinter (although the teleprinter was not present in this photo), looking backward (aft) toward the airlock. The locker is denoted MA9F, indicating Mid-deck Aft, position 9F (details), in the back on the right side of the Shuttle.

The teleprinter was noisy because of its impact printing; even with it in a locker, the sound outside was 69.5 dB. The solution was to soundproof the locker with acoustic insulation. Various insulating materials were tested until one was found that passed the toxicity requirements. Another flammability waiver was required for the insulation.

Putting the teleprinter in an insulated locker without cooling caused another problem: overheating. The military teleprinter used 34 watts even while idle, which would cause the printer to become dangerously hot after just 6 orbits. The printer was redesigned to support a standby mode that used just 1 watt. When a signal from Earth was detected, the printer would power up while in use, and then return to standby mode. A circuit was added to send a tone back to Earth when the printer was activated, reassuring Mission Control that the printer had switched out of standby mode. These circuits were on the three custom Shuttle boards described earlier.

Putting the teleprinter in a locker made cabling difficult. The solution was a panel on the locker door with connectors for power and audio. The panel has a power switch and light as well as a light to indicate that a message has been received.

The photo below shows the teleprinter locker with the connection panel on the far left. Note the cables attached to the connectors. These cables went across the back of the Shuttle to the left side, where they went up to the flight deck; the cable routing was performed before launch.14 For this flight, the neighboring locker MA16F held 3300 honeybees for a student experiment.

The teleprinter cables connect to the shuttle at panel A15 on the aft bulkhead of the flight deck on the left side of the Shuttle. In other words, if you sat in the Shuttle Commander's seat in the cockpit and turned around, this is what you would see.

The audio cable from the teleprinter went to the Payload Specialist communication connection on panel A15, while the power cable went to the DC power connection right below. During launch, this audio connection was needed for crew communication, so the teleprinter was plugged in after launch and the audio settings were reconfigured on panel L9. A cue card was placed above panel L9 with instructions on the teleprinter.

The teleprinter's replacements

The Shuttle teleprinter was supposed to be used for a short time until the Uplink Text and Graphics System (TAGS) entered service, but things didn't work out that way. TAGS, described earlier, was the fax-like system that could receive grayscale images, but it depended on the TDRS satellites with their support for digital data. The first TDRS satellite was launched by the sixth shuttle flight, STS-6 (1983). This allowed the use of TAGS on STS-7, but the printer promptly jammed.15 TAGS had constant problems with jamming; on STS-35, the printer jammed and then the unjamming tool broke. Due to the unreliability of the TAGS, the Interim Teleprinter was kept in service as a backup device. TAGS was mounted on a dual cold plate in avionics bay 3 of the crew compartment middeck (details), on the other side of the airlock from the teleprinter.

After a decade, another printer, the Thermal Impulse Printer System (TIPS) was put into service, probably on flight STS-56 in 1993. Once TIPS proved its reliability, it replaced both the teleprinter and the Text and Graphics System (TAGS). The TIPS printer was installed in mid-deck locker MF28E; the F indicates the locker was on the forward wall, not the aft wall that held the Interim Teleprinter. As a backup for the TIPS, the Shuttle flew with a second TIPS.

One motivation behind the TIPS thermal printer was NASA's desire to use more commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) equipment instead of expensive custom equipment. The TIPS printer is the Raytheon TDU-850 printer (below), a commercial product that sold for $4950. A custom communication interface board inside the printer provided the interface between the printer and the Shuttle's S-Band and Ku-Band communications systems. This interface also allowed astronauts to use the TIPS as a printer for an onboard personal computer.

The photo below shows the TIPS printer in use, printing a long stream of output that Eileen Collins is reading. Collins was the first woman to pilot the Space Shuttle; she flew on the Shuttle four times, twice as pilot and twice as commander.

The teleprinter, operational

We succeeded in making the Shuttle teleprinter operational. The printer had many mechanical problems, mainly because the rubber rollers had turned to liquid and gummed up the mechanism. Marc disassembled the printer, carefully cleaned the mechanism, and realigned everything. I won't discuss the restoration process here since there will be a video on CuriousMarc's channel. We were able to send FSK-modulated data to the printer and it was printed successfully, as shown below.

Conclusions

At first, I thought that the Shuttle's Interim Teleprinter was a terrible design. It's absurdly heavy and was in danger of overheating. Although the design started with an existing product, much of it required redesign: the front section, the new drum, the interface, and even the frame. The design inherited features it couldn't use, such as the built-in word processor. And the constant-current feature was pointless for the Shuttle and just wasted power.

When I learned that the design had to be completed in just seven months, my opinion of the teleprinter improved. Moreover, the design had many constraints, such as toxicity and flammability restrictions, that limited the potential approaches.

In the end, the teleprinter was used on over 50 flights, acting as a reliable backup to the somewhat flaky Text and Graphics System (TAGS).16 Despite its name, the Interim Teleprinter turned out to be a long-lasting solution, not interim at all. So I have to conclude that the teleprinter was a good design, working much better and much longer than intended.17

In any case, the Interim Teleprinter is an interesting piece of hardware and I hope you enjoyed this article. Follow me on Mastodon as @kenshirriff@oldbytes.space or RSS. Thanks to Marcel for providing the printer. Restoration performed with CuriousMarc, Eric Schlapefer, and Mike Stewart.

Notes and references

The Space Shuttle contained a bulky printer so the astronauts could receive procedures, mission plans, weather reports, crew activity plans, and other documents. Needed for the first Shuttle launch in 1981, this printer was designed in just 7 months, built around an Army communications terminal. Unlike modern printers, the Shuttle's printer contains a spinning metal drum with raised characters, allowing it to rapidly print a line at a time.

This printer is known as the Space Shuttle Interim Teleprinter System.1 As the name "Interim" suggests, this printer was intended as a stop-gap measure, operating for a few flights until a better printer was operational. However, the teleprinter proved to be more reliable than its replacement, so it remained in use as a backup for over 50 flights, often printing thousands of lines per flight. This didn't come cheap: with a Shuttle flight costing $27,000 per pound, putting the 59-pound teleprinter in space cost over $1.5 million per flight.

We obtained access to a Shuttle teleprinter (probably a development system that remained on the ground) and wanted to put it into operation. I had to reverse engineer three of the boards inside the printer to determine the data format the printer accepted: serial data encoded into audio. But after analyzing the printer and performing a lot of maintenance, we succeeded in getting the printer to print. In this article, I'll describe the Shuttle's Interim Teleprinter, explain its circuitry and drum-based printing mechanism, and show it in operation.

History of the Shuttle's Interim Teleprinter

The motivation for the teleprinter goes back to the Apollo program. During Apollo missions, the only way to send information to the astronauts was by talking to them over the radio and having the astronauts write down the data. NASA decided that the Space Shuttle should include a mechanism to send text and images to the astronauts, a 78-pound, high-tech fax machine called the Uplink Text & Graphics System (TAGS). A high-resolution grayscale image was sent to the Shuttle as a digital data stream. Onboard the Shuttle, a squat CRT displayed the image one line at a time and a fiber-optic faceplate transferred each line to light-sensitive silver emulsion paper. The paper was developed by passing it over a hot roller at 260ºF for 25 seconds, creating a permanent image.

The one flaw in this plan was that sending the digital image to the Shuttle required the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRS), which due to delays wouldn't be ready until the sixth Shuttle flight. (The TDRS was a space-based replacement for the worldwide network of ground stations that was used during Apollo.) As a result, NASA decided just seven months before the first Shuttle launch that they needed an interim system "for transmission of real-time, flight-plan changes and other operational data to the crew."2

The Shuttle teleprinter is the result of this rushed effort to create a printer that could work over the existing audio channel rather than the digital TDRS satellite. Due to the time pressure, the Shuttle teleprinter needed to be based on an off-the-shelf printer. Thermal and electrostatic printers were rejected due to toxicity and flammability problems. (The Shuttle teleprinter used a roll of yellowish paper, which required a NASA waiver due to its flammability, a concern ever since the Apollo-1 disaster).

The decision was made to use a military communications terminal, the the AN/UCG-743 "Tactical Teletype". The terminal's interfacing was very flexible, supporting serial data in either ASCII or Baudot format, with multiple configurations and baud rates (up to 1200 baud), using either a current-loop or voltage signals. The military terminal supported two-way communication, so it had a keyboard. Remarkably, the terminal also implemented a word processor, controlled by a Motorola 6800 microprocessor (ancestor of the famous MOS 6502). The word processor allowed messages to be composed offline, minimizing the radio transmission time, which was important in a hostile environment. As will be seen, this 100-pound military system required many large changes to be usable on the Space Shuttle, most visibly removing the keyboard.

The printing mechanism

The teleprinter uses a spinning drum with raised characters, shown below.4 To print a character, the printer fires a hammer, forcing the inked ribbon and paper against the raised character on the drum. The drum is 80 characters wide, matching the line length, and there are 80 corresponding hammers, one for each print position. The drum has 64 printable characters, wrapped around each position of the drum.

The printer prints a line at a time, not instantaneously, but during each revolution of the drum. When the drum makes one complete revolution, each of the 64 characters passes by each print position once. Printing requires precise timing of the hammers to strike the right character on the drum as it whizzes by. The printer control circuitry triggers each hammer at the proper time, when the desired character on the drum is lined up with the hammer, producing the desired text.5

The character set is slightly different between the military printer and the Shuttle printer. The military drum had 64 ASCII characters (upper-case letters only, numbers, and special characters). The drum doesn't contain an explicit space character, since nothing is printed for a space. In its place, the drum has a diamond "◊", used as a special character to indicate a parity error or other error. The drum for the Shuttle teleprinter replaces 10 ASCII special characters with symbols that are more useful to the Shuttle, such as Greek letters for angles. Specifically, the characters ;@[\]^!"#$ are replaced by θ✓‾↑↓~αβΔϕ.

The video below shows a closeup of the hammers as they strike the paper to print text. The text is the teleprinter's built-in test message: "THE LAZY YELLOW DOG WAS CAUGHT BY THE SLOW RED FOX AS HE LAY SLEEPING IN THE SUN". This test message is based on the traditional quick brown fox..., which is a pangram, containing all 26 letters, but the teleprinter's test sentence is missing J, K, M, Q, and V. However, the test message is exactly 80 characters long and replaces spaces with the diamond "◊", so it is effective for verifying that all 80 columns work.

The electronics

The photo below shows the circuitry inside the teleprinter, looking down from above. At the left are the three interface boards, custom boards that demodulate the incoming audio signal. In front of the interface boards are large inductors to filter the incoming power. Hidden beneath them, a solid-state relay controls the power to the rest of the printer, implementing the low-power standby mode. In the middle, the blue board is the surprisingly complex switching power supply, mounted on a thick metal plate for cooling. Normally, the large roll of paper is mounted above the power supply board. At the right, four large circuit boards implement the main logic of the printer: a printer driver board, a communications board, a memory board, and the processor board. The rotating drum is protected by the perforated black metal grill at the front.

The demodulator boards

The original military teleprinter received data as a serial bitstream. However, on the Space Shuttle, data was encoded as frequencies on the audio link. Three custom boards were constructed to demodulate the audio data so the rest of the printer could handle it. These boards also performed Shuttle-specific tasks such as powering up the printer when a message comes in, and then returning the printer to standby mode. I reverse-engineered these boards to determine how they work and to determine the data encoding. (Schematics are in the footnotes.7) In this section, I'll discuss these three boards, which are on the left side of the printer.

To summarize, the serial bitstream is encoded with Frequency Shift Keying, with a 0 represented by 3600 Hz and a 1 represented by 7200 Hz.6 The serial data is transmitted at 600 baud, even parity, one stop bit. The demodulation process first converts the input audio to a digital signal by thresholding it. (That is, the input sine wave is converted to a square wave.) The digital signal is autocorrelated to distinguish the 3600 Hz and 7200 Hz signals, recovering the underlying serial data. This signal is passed to the printer's logic boards (part of the original military teleprinter), which convert the serial signal to ASCII bytes and prints them.

Signal processing starts with the "FSK input" board, shown below. First, it amplifies the input audio signal. (The two large resistors provide a 600 Ω load for the audio input.) Next, a 900 Hz high-pass filter eliminates low-frequency noise. (The filter is implemented by a two-stage Sallen-Key topology.)

The signal bounces from board to board, going to the "output FSK demod" board next. This board has a carrier-detect circuit that turns on the rest of the printer if it detects an input signal. This allows the printer to sit idle until it receives a signal from Earth. This board also applies the threshold to the signal to turn it into a digital waveform, which goes to the "control" board.

The output board also holds the 5-volt and 12-volt linear regulators that power the three boards; these are the metal-can ICs at the bottom of the board. To reduce the load on the regulators, two large resistors drop the input voltage (28 volts) to a lower level before it is regulated.

The control board holds the FSK decoder, an interesting circuit that converts the two FSK frequencies to binary by implementing a digital auto-correlator. It uses a 64-bit shift register to delay the digital input by 139 µs. The input and the delayed input are XOR'd together, generating a result that depends on the frequency. A 7200 Hz signal repeats every 139 µs, so the input and the delayed input match, yielding 0 from the XOR. However, a 3600 Hz square wave switches state every 139 µs, so the two XOR inputs will always differ, resulting in a 1 output. Thus, the circuit cleanly distinguishes between a 3600 Hz input and a 7200 Hz input. (The XOR output is opposite from the final value since it gets inverted later.)

The digital demodulator avoids some of the problems of an analog FSK demodulator. It is not sensitive to signal levels, since the signal is converted to digital. The digital demodulator is also not sensitive to harmonics, which can cause problems with analog demodulators. Finally, it doesn't require the carefully-tuned filters of an analog circuit.

The demodulated signal passes from the control board back to the output board. This board applies a 400 Hz low-pass filter and then a threshold to convert the signal back to binary. If the input frequencies are not exact, the demodulator will produce the correct 0 or 1 value over most of the waveform, but there will be glitches at the edges. The low-pass filter removes these glitches. (You might be concerned that a 600-baud signal would be wiped out by a 400 Hz low-pass filter. However, the worst case signal (alternating 0's and 1's) would be 300 Hz because it takes two bits to make one cycle, so the filter has plenty of margin.) Next, the board blocks the signal unless a carrier is detected. This ensures that random noise isn't demodulated and printed. Finally, the serial binary signal leaves the custom Shuttle boards and goes to the teleprinter's communication board, part of the standard teleprinter.

I noticed two unusual things about these boards. First, they have some modifications: "bodge" wires and added components. Second, the boards are not conformal coated, which is unusual for aerospace boards. (The four logic cards, in comparison, are protected with conformal coating.) My hypothesis is that these boards were development boards, early in the design process of the Shuttle teleprinter, so they were modified as the design changed. The teleprinter is also marked "Not for flight", which supports this theory.

The logic cards

The military teleprinter contained four logic circuit cards: a CPU card, a memory card, a communications card, and a print control card, mounted at the right rear of the teleprinter. These cards are used unchanged in the Shuttle teleprinter.

The circuitry is more complex than you might expect, with four large cards full of ICs. There are several reasons for this. First, the cards use 1970s microprocessor technology, so it takes a lot of circuitry to do anything. In particular, many simple 7400-series logic chips perform "glue" functions: decoding addresses, buffering data, latching signals, and so forth. Moreover, a drum printer is inherently complicated, since 80 hammers must be driven at the right time based on the desired characters. Third, the teleprinter is very flexible, supporting multiple signal levels and two character formats (ASCII and Baudot). Most surprisingly, the teleprinter implements a word processor, allowing messages to be composed and edited offline. Of course, since the Shuttle's teleprinter is only used to receive data, and doesn't even have a keyboard, the word processor feature is entirely useless.

The CPU card

The CPU card holds the microprocessor that controls the teleprinter. Its most important function is to convert a line of ASCII characters into print drum codes. These codes are stored in memory for use by the print control card. The CPU also implements configuration and self-test functions.

The diagram below shows some of the main components. The CPU card contains a Motorola 6800 CPU, 4 kilobytes of memory, and a ROM that holds its program code.8 Inconveniently, all the IC part numbers are military numbers so it takes some investigation to determine what a part really is. The MC6822 is a Peripheral Interface Adapter, a Motorola chip that provides two parallel I/O ports. This chip is used on three of the cards to support a variety of I/O tasks. On the CPU card, the I/O ports drive eight status lamps (most of which were removed for the Shuttle teleprinter) as well as internal status signals such as "paper low" or "keyboard present" and the baud rate setting input.

The print control card

In a sense, the print control card is the heart of the printer, since it causes characters to be printed by firing hammers against the rotating drum. As the drum goes through one revolution, all 64 characters will spin past each of the 80 print positions. By firing hammers at the exact time, the card prints a line of text.9 In more detail, for each row on the drum, the printer card scans through the 80-character memory buffer using Direct Memory Access (DMA). If the value in memory matches the current drum row number, the hammer is fired. Note that the hammers don't fire simultaneously, but in sequence as memory is scanned.

The diagram above shows the interaction between the drum, the print control card, and the 80 hammers. The hammers are implemented on 20 print hammer cards, each with 4 hammers. Electrically, the hammers are arranged in a matrix. One wire out of 20 (S1-S20) selects the hammer board, the group of four. Another wire selects one of four hammers (Col 1-4). This approach simplifies the electronics, since 20 + 4 driver circuits and wires are used, rather than 80 (one for each column). The print control card is synchronized to the drum by two photo-transistor sensors that detect the drum's position. One sensor is triggered on each row, while the other sensor triggers once per revolution.

The print control card is shown below, with the main functional blocks labeled. The large purple-and-gold chip is the PIA, the same I/O chip that appeared on the CPU card. It handles a variety of signals such as the self-test request, paper out, and the drum stop signal. The mode control logic generates timing signals depending on the printer's mode. The data compare logic increments the row counter on each drum pulse, and compares the row counter to the value read from memory.10 The hammer driver circuitry on the left selects one of the 20 hammer cards, while the hammer driver circuitry on the right selects one of four hammers. The ribbon circuitry raises and lowers the ribbon so the ribbon doesn't block the text when the printer is idle. The line feed circuitry advances the paper for a line feed operation.

The photo below shows one of the hammer cards, with four hammers. Each hammer has an electromagnet that pulls a lever, rotating the hammer wheel, and causing the hammer to strike the paper. (The hammers themselves are in the upper right of the photo.) A screw adjustment controls the distance between each hammer and the paper, allowing precise adjustment of the timing. (Marc had to carefully adjust all the hammers to make the print quality readable.)

The communication card

The communication card handles the teleprinter's serial data input. The key chip is the 8251A, a USART (Universal Synchronous/Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter). This complex chip performs the conversion between the serial data stream and the bytes that the processor uses. (Note that the military teleprinter both sent and received serial data, while the Shuttle teleprinter only receives data.) The chip has a few support chips, labeled "UART" in the diagram below. The board has another Peripheral Interface Adapter chip, providing two I/O ports. These ports have functions such as reading the serial line settings (ASCII vs. Baudot, odd or even parity, number of stop bits, and current loop levels).

The board also has circuitry to generate the clock pulses for the selected baud rate. The mode circuitry handles various phases of transmit/receive. The filter/demod circuitry handles different input types, digitally filtering and demodulating as necessary.11

The memory card

The memory card supports the word-processing feature. It provides additional RAM to hold the text buffer as well as the ROM holding the software for editing. The 16 DRAM chips on the left (MK4027) provide 8 KB of RAM while the two ROM chips on the right provide 8K of ROM. The chips in the middle to the right of the resistors split the 12 address bits into row and column addresses as required by the RAM chips. The address signals go through the numerous 24 Ω resistors in the middle; I don't know why. According to the manual, the printer operates fine without this card, except without the word processor. Since the word processor was irrelevant to the Shuttle, I wonder why this card wasn't removed to reduce weight.

The power supply

The power supply board (shown earlier) implements separate power supplies for different parts of the printer.12 The supplies are implemented as switching power supplies, which were not as common at the time as now. The microprocessor supply provides +5V, +12V, and -5V, voltages required by memory chips in the 1970s. A separate switching power supply provides +5V, -8.6V, and +8.6V for the keyboard, dustcover, and interface module, components that were removed for the Shuttle teleprinter. Another supply powers the printer's status lamps.

The drum motor supply is important because its voltage is regulated to control the rotational speed of the drum. A sensor on the drum provides a feedback pulse for each row on the drum. (I think the drum speed is 868 RPM.) These pulses control the drum motor's switching supply. If the drum spins too slowly, the voltage is increased, and similarly if it spins too fast.

The hammers have an unusual constant-current power supply. When the printer is active, this power supply generates +18 V. However, the power supply is designed to use a constant current of 600 mA regardless of the hammer activity. A capacitor provides a reservoir of power that is filled by the constant current. If the hammers are using less current, the excess current is bled off through a resistor. The purpose of this is "to mask printing intelligence during periods of message traffic." In other words, if you used a teleprinter in the embassy in Moscow, for instance, spies could monitor power transients to see when hammers are firing, and perhaps figure out what is being printed. By keeping the current constant, this source of intelligence is blocked. Of course, this feature is useless on the Space Shuttle and only wastes power.

The military teleprinter accepted multiple input voltages: 22-30 VDC, 115 VAC, or 230 VAC, along with a 12 VDC battery backup. The transformers and diodes to support these voltages were part of the interface module that was removed for the Shuttle teleprinter. Instead, the Shuttle teleprinter is powered by 28 VDC.

Mechanical changes

The military teleprinter underwent significant mechanical changes to make it suitable for the Shuttle. These changes reduced its weight from 100 pounds to 59 pounds. The most visible change to the printer is the removal of the keyboard. The entire front section of the printer was replaced, removing the controls that were not needed in the Shuttle.13 The rugged frame of the original printer was replaced with a lighter-weight (but still substantial) frame. Horizontal rails were added to the frame to support the printer in the Shuttle locker.

The photo below shows the front of the Shuttle teleprinter. While the military teleprinter had numerous lights and switches on the front, the Shuttle teleprinter has just two lights and four switches.

NASA was concerned that the temperature of the teleprinter could become hazardous to the astronauts. To mitigate this danger, the teleprinter had a large heat-sensitive warning sticker. The yellow sticker on the left of the teleprinter changes color and displays an image if it heats up: it shows a bandaged hand and the word "HOT". Above it is an "Omegalabel" temperature monitoring sticker that shows the highest temperature the device reached. There are more of these stickers inside the teleprinter on various motors.

The Interim Teleprinter inside the Space Shuttle

The teleprinter was too large to be mounted on the flight deck, so it was mounted in a storage locker on the middeck, one level lower. The photo below shows the location of the locker that held the teleprinter (although the teleprinter was not present in this photo), looking backward (aft) toward the airlock. The locker is denoted MA9F, indicating Mid-deck Aft, position 9F (details), in the back on the right side of the Shuttle.

The teleprinter was noisy because of its impact printing; even with it in a locker, the sound outside was 69.5 dB. The solution was to soundproof the locker with acoustic insulation. Various insulating materials were tested until one was found that passed the toxicity requirements. Another flammability waiver was required for the insulation.

Putting the teleprinter in an insulated locker without cooling caused another problem: overheating. The military teleprinter used 34 watts even while idle, which would cause the printer to become dangerously hot after just 6 orbits. The printer was redesigned to support a standby mode that used just 1 watt. When a signal from Earth was detected, the printer would power up while in use, and then return to standby mode. A circuit was added to send a tone back to Earth when the printer was activated, reassuring Mission Control that the printer had switched out of standby mode. These circuits were on the three custom Shuttle boards described earlier.

Putting the teleprinter in a locker made cabling difficult. The solution was a panel on the locker door with connectors for power and audio. The panel has a power switch and light as well as a light to indicate that a message has been received.

The photo below shows the teleprinter locker with the connection panel on the far left. Note the cables attached to the connectors. These cables went across the back of the Shuttle to the left side, where they went up to the flight deck; the cable routing was performed before launch.14 For this flight, the neighboring locker MA16F held 3300 honeybees for a student experiment.

The teleprinter cables connect to the shuttle at panel A15 on the aft bulkhead of the flight deck on the left side of the Shuttle. In other words, if you sat in the Shuttle Commander's seat in the cockpit and turned around, this is what you would see.

The audio cable from the teleprinter went to the Payload Specialist communication connection on panel A15, while the power cable went to the DC power connection right below. During launch, this audio connection was needed for crew communication, so the teleprinter was plugged in after launch and the audio settings were reconfigured on panel L9. A cue card was placed above panel L9 with instructions on the teleprinter.

The teleprinter's replacements

The Shuttle teleprinter was supposed to be used for a short time until the Uplink Text and Graphics System (TAGS) entered service, but things didn't work out that way. TAGS, described earlier, was the fax-like system that could receive grayscale images, but it depended on the TDRS satellites with their support for digital data. The first TDRS satellite was launched by the sixth shuttle flight, STS-6 (1983). This allowed the use of TAGS on STS-7, but the printer promptly jammed.15 TAGS had constant problems with jamming; on STS-35, the printer jammed and then the unjamming tool broke. Due to the unreliability of the TAGS, the Interim Teleprinter was kept in service as a backup device. TAGS was mounted on a dual cold plate in avionics bay 3 of the crew compartment middeck (details), on the other side of the airlock from the teleprinter.

After a decade, another printer, the Thermal Impulse Printer System (TIPS) was put into service, probably on flight STS-56 in 1993. Once TIPS proved its reliability, it replaced both the teleprinter and the Text and Graphics System (TAGS). The TIPS printer was installed in mid-deck locker MF28E; the F indicates the locker was on the forward wall, not the aft wall that held the Interim Teleprinter. As a backup for the TIPS, the Shuttle flew with a second TIPS.

One motivation behind the TIPS thermal printer was NASA's desire to use more commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) equipment instead of expensive custom equipment. The TIPS printer is the Raytheon TDU-850 printer (below), a commercial product that sold for $4950. A custom communication interface board inside the printer provided the interface between the printer and the Shuttle's S-Band and Ku-Band communications systems. This interface also allowed astronauts to use the TIPS as a printer for an onboard personal computer.

The photo below shows the TIPS printer in use, printing a long stream of output that Eileen Collins is reading. Collins was the first woman to pilot the Space Shuttle; she flew on the Shuttle four times, twice as pilot and twice as commander.

The teleprinter, operational

We succeeded in making the Shuttle teleprinter operational. The printer had many mechanical problems, mainly because the rubber rollers had turned to liquid and gummed up the mechanism. Marc disassembled the printer, carefully cleaned the mechanism, and realigned everything. I won't discuss the restoration process here since there will be a video on CuriousMarc's channel. We were able to send FSK-modulated data to the printer and it was printed successfully, as shown below.

Conclusions

At first, I thought that the Shuttle's Interim Teleprinter was a terrible design. It's absurdly heavy and was in danger of overheating. Although the design started with an existing product, much of it required redesign: the front section, the new drum, the interface, and even the frame. The design inherited features it couldn't use, such as the built-in word processor. And the constant-current feature was pointless for the Shuttle and just wasted power.

When I learned that the design had to be completed in just seven months, my opinion of the teleprinter improved. Moreover, the design had many constraints, such as toxicity and flammability restrictions, that limited the potential approaches.

In the end, the teleprinter was used on over 50 flights, acting as a reliable backup to the somewhat flaky Text and Graphics System (TAGS).16 Despite its name, the Interim Teleprinter turned out to be a long-lasting solution, not interim at all. So I have to conclude that the teleprinter was a good design, working much better and much longer than intended.17

In any case, the Interim Teleprinter is an interesting piece of hardware and I hope you enjoyed this article. Follow me on Mastodon as @kenshirriff@oldbytes.space or RSS. Thanks to Marcel for providing the printer. Restoration performed with CuriousMarc, Eric Schlapefer, and Mike Stewart.

Notes and references

In this article, I look inside a chip in the IBM 3274 Control Unit.1 But before I discuss the chip, I need to give some background on mainframes. (I didn't completely analyze the chip, so don't expect a nice narrative or solid conclusions.)

IBM's vintage mainframes were extremely underpowered compared to modern computers; a System/370 mainframe ran well under 1 million instructions per second, while a modern laptop executes billions of instructions per second. But these mainframes could support rooms full of users, while my 2017 laptop can barely handle one person.2 Mainframes achieved their high capacity by offloading much of the data entry overhead so the mainframe could focus on the "important" work. The mainframe received data directly into memory in bulk over high-speed I/O channels, without needing to handle character-by-character editing. For instance, a typical data entry terminal (a "3270") let the user update fields on the screen without involving the computer. When the user had filled out the screen, pressing the "Enter" key sent the entire data record to the mainframe at once. Thus, the mainframe didn't need to process every keystroke; it only dealt with complete records. (This is also why many modern keyboards have an "Enter" key.)

But that was just the beginning of the hierarchy of offloaded processing in a mainframe system. Terminals weren't attached directly to the mainframe. You could wire 16 terminals to a terminal multiplexer (such as the 3299). This would in turn be connected to a 3274 Control Unit that merged the terminal data and handled the network protocols. The Control Unit was connected to the mainframe's channel processor which handled I/O by moving data between memory and peripherals without slowing down the CPU. All these layers allowed the mainframe to focus on the important data processing while the layers underneath dealt with the details.3

The 3274 Control Unit (highlighted above) is the source of the chip I examined. The purpose of the Control Unit "is to take care of all communication between the host system and your organization's display stations and printers". The diagram above shows how terminals were connected to a mainframe, with the 3274 Control Unit (indicated by arrows) in the middle. The 3274 was an all-purpose box, handling terminals, printers, modems, and encryption (if needed). It could communicate with the mainframe at up to 650,000 characters per second. The control unit below (above) is a boring beige box. The control panel is minimal since people normally didn't interact with the unit. On the back are coaxial connectors for the lines to the terminals, as well as connectors to interface with the computer and other peripherals.

The Keystone II board

In 1983, IBM announced new Control Unit models with twice the speed: these were the Model 41 and Model 61. These units were built around a board called Keystone II, shown below. The board is constructed with IBM's peculiar PCB style. The board is arranged as a grid of squares with the PCB traces too small to see unless you zoom in. Most of the decoupling capacitors are in IBM's thin, rectangular packages, although I see a few capacitors in more standard blue packages. IBM is almost a parallel universe with its unusual packaging for ICs and capacitors as well as the strange circuit board appearance.

Most of the chips on the board are IBM chips packaged in square aluminum cans, known as MST (Monolithic System Technology). The first line on each package is the IBM part number, which is usually undocumented. The empty socket can hold a ROS chip; ROS is Read-Only Store, known as ROM to people outside IBM. The Texas Instruments ICs in the upper right are easier to identify; the 74LS641 chips are octal bus transceivers, presumably connecting this board to the rest of the system. Similarly, the 561 5843 is a 74S240 octal bus driver while the 561 6647 chips are 74LS245 octal bus transceivers.

The memory chips on the left side of this board are interesting: each one consists of two "piggybacked" 16-kilobit DRAM chips. IBM's part number 8279251 corresponds to the Intel 4116 chip, originally made by Mostek. With 18 piggybacked chips, the board holds 64 kilobytes of parity-protected memory.

The photo below shows the Keystone II board mounted in the 3274 Control Unit. The board is in slot E towards the left and the purple Motorola IC is visible.

The Motorola/IBM chip

The board has a Motorola chip in a purple ceramic package; this is the chip that I examined. Popping off the golden lid reveals the silicon die underneath. The package has the part number "SC81150R", indicating a Motorola Special/Custom chip. This part number is also visible on the die, as shown below.

While the outside of the IC is labeled "Motorola", there are no signs of Motorola internally. Instead, the die is marked "IBM" with the eight-striped logo. My guess is that IBM designed the chip and Motorola manufactured it.

The diagram below shows the chip with some of the functional blocks identified. Around the outside are the bond pads and the bond wires that are connected to the chip's grid of pins. At the right is the 16×16 block of memory, along with its associated control, byte swap, and output circuitry. The yellowish-white lines are the metal layer on top of the chip that provides the chip's wiring. The thick metal lines distribute power and ground throughout the chip. Unlike modern chips, this chip only has a single metal layer, so power and ground distribution tends to get in the way of useful circuitry.

The chip is centered around a 16-bit bus (yellow line) that connects many part of the chip. To write to the bus, a circuit pulls bus lines low. The bus lines are kept high by default by 16 pull-up transistors. This approach was fairly common in the NMOS era. However, performance is limited by the relatively weak pull-up current, making bus lines slow to go high due to R-C delays. For higher performance, some chips would precharge the bus high during one clock cycle and then pull lines low during the next cycle.

The two groups of I/O pins at the bottom are connected to the input buffer on the left and the output buffer on the right. The input buffer includes XOR circuits to compute the parity of each byte. Curiously, only 6 bits of the inputs are connected to the main bus, although other circuits use all 8 bits. The buffer also has a circuit to test for a zero value, but only using 5 of the bits.

I've put red boxes around the numerous PLAs, which can be identified by their grids of transistors. This chip has an unusually large number of PLAs. Eric Schlaepfer hypothesizes that the chip was designed on a prototype circuit board using commercial PAL chips for flexibility, and then they transferred the prototype to silicon, preserving the PLA structure. I didn't see any obvious structure to the PLAs; they all seemed to have wires going all over.

The miscellaneous logic scattered around the chip includes many latches and bus drivers; the latch circuit is similar to the memory cells. I didn't fully reverse-engineer this circuitry but I didn't see anything that looked particularly interesting, such as an ALU or counter. The circuitry near the PLAs could be latches as part of state machines, but I didn't investigate further.

I was hoping to find a recognizable processor inside the package, maybe a Motorola 6809 or 68000 processor. Instead, I found a complicated chip that doesn't appear to be a processor. It has a 16×16 memory block along with about 20 PLAs (Programmable Logic Arrays), a curiously large number. PLAs are commonly used in processors for decoding instructions, since they can match bit patterns. I couldn't find a datapatch in the chip; I expected to see the ALU and registers organized in a large but regular 8-bit or 16-bit block of circuitry. The chip doesn't have any ROM4 so there's no microcode on the chip. For these reasons, I think the chip is not a processor or microcontroller, but a specialized data-handling chip, maybe using the PLAs to interpret bits of a protocol.

The chip is built with NMOS technology, the same as the 6502 and 8086 for instance, rather than CMOS technology that is used in modern chips. I measured the transistor features and the chip appears to be built with a 3.5 µm process (not nm!), which Motorola also used for the 68000 processor (1979).

The memory buffer

The chip has a 16×16 memory buffer, which could be a register file or a FIFO buffer. One interesting feature is that the buffer is triple-ported, so it can handle two reads and one write at the same time. The buffer is implemented as a grid of cells, each storing one bit. Each row corresponds to a 16-bit word, while each column corresponds to one bit in a word. Horizontal control lines (made of polysilicon) select which word gets written or read, while vertical bit lines of metal transmit each bit of the word as it is written or read.

The microscope photo below shows two memory cells. These cells are repeated to create the entire memory buffer. The white vertical lines are metal wiring. The short segments are connections within a cell. The thicker vertical lines are power and ground. The thinner lines are the read and write bit lines. The silicon die itself is underneath the metal. The pinkish regions are active silicon, doped to make it conductive. The speckled golden lines are regions are polysilicon wires between the silicon and the metal. It has two roles: most importantly, when polysilicon crosses active silicon, it forms the gate of a transistor. But polysilicon is also used as wiring, important since this chip only has one layer of metal. The large, dark circles are contacts, connections between the metal layer and the silicon. Smaller square regions are contacts between silicon and polysilicon.

It was too difficult to interpret the circuits when they were obscured by the metal layer so I dissolved the metal layer and oxide with hydrochloric acid and Armour Etch respectively. The photo below shows the die with the metal removed; the greenish areas are remnants in areas where the metal was thick, mostly power and ground supplies. The dark regions in this image are regions of doped silicon. These are the active areas of the chip, showing the blocks of circuitry. There are also some thin lines of polysilicon wiring. The memory buffer is the large block on the right, just below the center.

Like most implementations of static RAM, each storage cell of the buffer is implemented with cross-coupled inverters, with the output of one inverter feeding into the input of the other. To write a new value to the cell, the new value simply overpowers the inverter output, forcing the cell to the new state. To support this, one of the inverters is designed to be weak, generating a smaller signal than a regular inverter. Most circuits that I've examined create the inverter by using a weak transistor, one with a longer gate. This chip, however, uses a circuit that I haven't seen before: an additional transistor, configured to limit the current from the inverter.

The schematic below shows one cell. Each cell uses ten transistors, so it is a "10T" cell. To support multiple reads and writes, each row of cells has three horizontal control signals: one to write to the word, and two to read. Each bit position has one vertical bit line to provide the write data and two vertical bit lines for the data that is read. Pass transistors connect the bit lines to the selected cells to perform a read or a write, allowing the data to flow in or out of the cell. The symbol that looks like an op-amp is a two-transistor NMOS buffer to amplify the signal when reading the cell.

With the metal layer removed, it is easier to see the underlying silicon circuitry and reverse-engineer it. The diagram below shows the silicon and polysilicon for one storage cell, corresponding to the schematic above. (Imagine vertical metal lines for power, ground, and the three bitlines.)

The output from the memory unit contains a byte swapper. A 16-bit word is generated with the left half from the read 1 output and the second half from the read 2 output, but the bytes can be swapped. This was probably used to read an aligned 16-bit word if it was unaligned in memory.

Parity circuits

In the lower right part of the chip are two parity circuits, each computing the parity of an 8-bit input. The parity of an input is computed by XORing the bits together through a tree of 2-input XOR gates. First, four gates process pairs of input bits. Next, two XOR gates combine the outputs of the first gates. Finally, an XOR gate combines the two previous outputs to generate the final parity.

The schematic below shows how an XOR gate is built from a NOR gate and an AND-NOR gate. If both inputs are 0, the first NOR gate forces the output to 0. If both inputs are 1, the AND gate forces the output to 0. Thus, the circuit computes XOR. Each labeled block above implements the XOR circuit below.

Conclusion

My conclusion is that the processor for the Keystone II board is probably one of the other chips, one of the IBM metal-can MST packages, and this chip helps with data movement in some way. It would be possible to trace out the complete circuitry of the chip and determine exactly how it functions, but that is too time-consuming a project for this relatively obscure chip.

Follow me on Twitter @kenshirriff or RSS for more chip posts. I'm also on Mastodon occasionally as @kenshirriff@oldbytes.space. Thanks to Al Kossow for providing the chip and Dag Spicer for providing photos. Thanks to Eric Schlaepfer for discussion.

Notes and references

Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, a chip to "separate the really power-hungry folks from ordinary mortals." The original Pentium was followed by the Pentium Pro, the Pentium II, and others, spawning a long-running brand of high-performance processors, Intel's flagship line until the Core processors took over in 2006. The Pentium eventually became virtually synonymous with "PC" and even made it into pop culture.

Even though the Pentium is a complex chip with 3.3 million transistors, its transistors are visible under a microscope, unlike modern chips. By examining the chip, we can see the interesting circuits used for gates, flip-flops, and other circuits, including the use of an unusual technology called BiCMOS. In this article, I take a close look at the original Pentium chip1, showing how much of its circuitry was built out of structured rows of tiny transistors, a technique known as standard-cell design.

The die photo below shows the Pentium's fingernail-sized silicon die under a microscope. I removed the chip's four metal layers to show the underlying silicon, revealing the individual transistors, which are obscured in most die photos by the layers of metal. Standard-cell circuitry, indicated by red boxes, is recognizable because the circuitry is arranged in uniform columns of cells, giving it a characteristic striped appearance. In contrast, the chip's manually-optimized functional blocks are denser and more structured, giving them a darker appearance. Examples are the caches on the left, the datapaths in the middle, and the microcode ROMs on the right.

Standard-cell design

Early processors in the 1970s were usually designed by manually laying out every transistor individually, fitting transistors together like puzzle pieces to optimize their layout. While this was tedious, it resulted in a highly dense layout. Federico Faggin, designer of the popular Z80 processor, was almost done when he ran into a problem. The last few transistors wouldn't fit, so he had to erase three weeks of work and start over. The closeup of the resulting Z80 layout below shows that each transistor has a different, complex shape, optimized to pack the transistors as tightly as possible.2

Because manual layout is slow, difficult, and error-prone, people developed automated approaches such as standard-cell.3 The idea behind standard-cell is to create a standard library of blocks (cells) to implement each type of gate, flip-flop, and other low-level component. To use a particular circuit, instead of arranging each transistor, you use the standard design from the library. Each cell has a fixed height but the width varies as needed, so the standard cells can be arranged in rows. The Pentium die photo below shows seven cells in a row. (The rectangular blobs are doped silicon while the long, thin vertical lines are polysilicon.) Compare the orderly arrangement of these transistors with the Z80 transistors above.

The photo below zooms out to show five rows of standard cells (the dark bands) and the wiring in between. Because CMOS circuitry uses two types of transistors (NMOS and PMOS), each standard-cell row appears as two closely-spaced bands: one of NMOS transistors and one of PMOS transistors. The space between rows is used as a "wiring channel" that holds the wiring between the cells. Power and ground for the circuitry run along the top and bottom of each row.

The fixed structure of standard cell design makes it suitable for automation, with the layout generated by "automatic place and route" software. The first step, placement, consists of determining an arrangement of cells that minimizes the distance between connected cells. Running long wires between cells wastes space on the die, since you end up with a lot of unnecessary metal wiring. But more importantly, long paths have higher capacitance, slowing down the signals. Once the cells are placed in their positions, the "routing" step generates the wiring to connect the calls. Placement and routing are both difficult optimization problems that are NP-complete.

Intel started using automated place and route techniques for the 386 processor, since it was much faster than manual layout and dramatically reduced the number of errors. Placement was done with a program called Timberwolf, developed by a Berkeley grad student. As one member of the 386 team said, "If management had known that we were using a tool by some grad student as a key part of the methodology, they would never have let us use it." Intel developed custom software for routing, using an iterative heuristic approach. Standard-cell design is still used in current processors, but the software is much more advanced.

A brief overview of CMOS

Before looking at the standard cell circuits in detail, I'll give a quick overview of how CMOS circuits are implemented. Modern processors are built from CMOS circuitry, which uses two types of transistors: NMOS and PMOS. The diagram below shows how an NMOS transistor is constructed. The transistor can be considered a switch between the source and drain, controlled by the gate. The source and drain regions (green) consist of silicon doped with impurities to change its semiconductor properties, forming N+ silicon. The gate consists of a layer of polysilicon (red), separated from the silicon by a very thin insulating oxide layer. Whenever polysilicon crosses active silicon, a transistor is formed.

The NMOS and PMOS transistors are opposite in their construction and operation. A PMOS transistor swaps the N-type and P-type silicon, so it consists of P+ regions in a substrate of N silicon. In operation, an NMOS transistor turns on when the gate is high, while a PMOS transistor turns on when the gate is low.4 An NMOS transistor is best at pulling its output low, while a PMOS transistor is best at pulling its output high. In a CMOS circuit, the transistors work as a team, pulling the output high or low as needed; the "C" in CMOS indicates this "Complementary" approach. NMOS and PMOS transistors are not entirely symmetrical, however, due to the underlying semiconductor physics. Instead, PMOS transistors need to be larger than NMOS transistors, which helps to distinguish PMOS transistors from NMOS transistors on the die.

The layers of circuitry in the Pentium

The construction of the Pentium is more complicated than the diagram above, with four layers of metal wiring that connect the transistors.5 Starting at the surface of the silicon die, the Pentium's transistors are similar to the diagram, with regions of silicon doped to change their semiconductor properties. Polysilicon wiring is created on top of the silicon. The most important role of the polysilicon is that when it crosses doped silicon, a transistor is formed, with the polysilicon as the gate. However, polysilicon is also used as wiring over short distances.

Above the silicon, four layers of metal connect the components: multiple metal layers allow signals to crisscross the chip without running into each other. The metal layers are numbered M1 through M4, with M1 on the bottom. A few rules control the wiring: a metal layer can connect with the layer above or below through a tungsten plug called a "via". Only the bottom metal, M1, can connect to the silicon or polysilicon, through a "contact". The layers usually alternate between horizontal wiring and vertical wiring (at least locally). Thus, a signal from a transistor may travel through M1, bounce up to M2 and M3 to cross other signals, and then go back down to M1 to connect to another transistor. As you can see, automated place and route software has a complicated task, producing millions of complicated wiring paths as densely as possible.

The diagram below shows how the layers appear on the chip. (This photo shows one of the rare spots on the chip where all the layers are visible.) The M4 metal layer on top of the chip is the thickest, so it is mostly used for power, ground, and clock signals rather than data. An M4 ground wire covers the top of this photo. The next layer down is M3. In this part of the chip, M3 lines run vertically. (Due to optical effects, the vertical M3 lines may look like they are on top of M4, but they are below.) The horizontal M2 metal lines are lower and appear brown rather than golden, due to the oxide layers that cover them. The bottom metal layer is M1. The vertical M1 lines are thick in this part of the chip because they provide power to the circuitry.

The silicon and polysilicon are mostly obscured in the above photo. By removing all the metal layers, I obtained the image below. This image shows the same region as the image above, but it is hard to see the correlation because the metal layers almost completely obscure the silicon. The orderly columns of transistors reveal the standard-cell design. The irregular dark regions are doped silicon, which forms the chip's transistors. The dark or shiny horizontal bands are polysilicon. I will explain below how these regions form gates and other circuits.

Inverter

The fundamental CMOS gate is an inverter, shown in the schematic below. The inverter is built from one PMOS transistor (top) and one NMOS transistor (bottom). If the gate input is a "1", the bottom transistor turns on, pulling the output to ground (0). A "0" input turns on the top transistor, pulling the output high (1). Thus, this two-transistor circuit implements an inverter.10

The diagram below shows two views of how a standard-cell inverter appears on the Pentium die, with and without metal. The inverter consists of two transistors, just like the schematic above. The input is connected to the two polysilicon gates of the transistors. The metal output wire is connected to the two transistors (the left sides, specifically).

In more detail, the image on the left includes the bottom (M1) metal layer, but I removed the other metal layers. Two thick metal lines at the top and bottom provide power and ground to the standard cells. The multiple dark circles are contacts between the M1 metal layer and the metal layer on top (M2), providing a path for power and ground that eventually reaches the top (M4) metal layer and then the chip's pins. (The power and ground wires are thick to provide sufficient current to the circuitry while minimizing voltage drops and noise.) The small, lighter circles are vias that connect the M1 metal layer to the underlying silicon or polysilicon. The input to the gate is provided from the M2 metal, which connects to the M1 layer at the indicated contact. The smaller black dots at the top and bottom of this metal strip are vias, connections to the underlying silicon.

For the image on the right, I removed all four metal layers, revealing the polysilicon and doped silicon. Recall that a transistor is constructed from regions of doped silicon with a stripe of polysilicon between the regions, forming the transistor's gate. The diagram shows the two transistors that form the inverter. When combined with the metal wiring, they form the inverter schematic shown earlier. The final feature is the "well tap". The PMOS transistors are constructed in a "well" of N-doped silicon. The well must be kept at a positive voltage, so periodic "taps" connect the well to the +3.3V supply. As mentioned earlier, the PMOS transistor is larger than the NMOS transistor, which allowed me to figure out the transistor types in the photo.

By the way, the chip is built with a 600 nm process, so the width of the polysilicon lines is approximately 600 nm. For comparison, the wavelength of visible light is 400 to 700 nm, with 600 nm corresponding to orange light. This explains why the microscope photos are somewhat fuzzy; the features are the size of the wavelength of light.6

NAND gate

Another common gate in the Pentium is the NAND gate. The schematic below shows a NAND gate with two PMOS transistors above and two NMOS transistors below. If both inputs are high, the two NMOS transistors turn on, pulling the output low. If either input is low, a PMOS transistor turns on, pulling the output high. (Recall that NMOS and PMOS are opposites: a high voltage turns an NMOS transistor on while a low voltage turns a PMOS transistor on.) Thus, the CMOS circuit below produces the desired output for the NAND function.

The implementation of the gate as a standard cell, below, follows the schematic. The left photo shows the circuit with one layer of metal (M1). A thick metal line provides 3.3 volts to the gate; it has two contacts that provide power to the two PMOS transistors. The metal line for ground is similar, except only one NMOS transistor is grounded. The thinner metal in the middle has two contacts to get the transistor outputs and a via to connect the output to the M2 metal layer on top. Finally, two tiny bits of M1 metal connect the inputs from the M2 layer to the underlying polysilicon.

The right photo shows the circuit with all metal removed, showing the polysilicon and silicon. Since a transistor is formed where a polysilicon line crosses doped silicon, the two polysilicon lines create four transistors. Polysilicon functions both as local wiring and as the transistor gates. In particular, the inputs can be connected at the top or bottom of the circuit (or both), depending on what works best for wiring the circuitry. Note that the transistors are squashed together so the silicon in the middle is part of two transistors. An important asymmetry is that the output is taken from the middle of the PMOS transistors, wiring them in parallel, while the output is taken from the right side of the NMOS transistors, wiring them in series.

Zooming out a bit, the photo below shows three NAND gates. Although the underlying standard cell is the same for each one, there are differences between the gates. At the top, horizontal wiring links the inputs to M2 through vias. The length of each polysilicon line depends on the position of the metal. Moreover, in the middle of each gate, the metal connection to the output is positioned differently. Finally, note that the power wiring shifts upward in the upper right corner; this is to make room for a larger cell to the right. The point is that the standard cells aren't simply copies of each other, but are adjusted in each case to put the inputs, outputs, and power in the right location. Also note that these standard cells are not isolated, but are squeezed together so the PMOS transistors are touching. This optimization slightly increases the density.

OR-NAND gate

The standard cell library includes some complex gates. For instance, the gate below is a 5-input OR-NAND gate, computing ~((A+B+C+D)⋅E). In the NMOS circuit, transistors A through D are paralleled while E is in series. The PMOS circuit is the opposite, with A through D in series and E in parallel. To provide sufficient current, the PMOS circuit has two sets of transistors for A through D, so the PMOS block is much larger than the NMOS block.

Latch

One of the key building blocks of the Pentium's circuitry is the latch. The idea of the latch is to hold one bit, controlled by the clock signal. A latch is "transparent": the latch's input immediately appears on the output while the clock is high. But when the clock is low, the latch holds its previous value. The latch is implemented with a feedback loop that passes the latch's output back into the latch. The heart of this latch circuit is the multiplexer (mux), which selects either the previous output (when the clock is low) or the new input (when the clock is high). The inverters amplify the feedback signal so it doesn't decay in the loop. An inverter also amplifies the output so it can drive other circuitry.

The circuit for a multiplexer is interesting since it uses "pass transistors". That is, the transistors simply pass their input through to the output, rather than pulling a signal to power or ground as in a typical logic gate. The schematic shows how this works. First, suppose that the select line is low. This will turn on the two transistors connected to the first input, allowing its level to flow to the output. Meanwhile, both transistors connected to the second input will be turned off, blocking that signal. But if the select line is high, everything switches. Now, the two transistors connected to the second input turn on, passing its level to the output. Thus, the multiplexer selects the first input if the control signal is low, and the second input if the control signal is high.

The diagram below shows a multiplexer, part of a latch. On the left, an inverter feeds into one input of the multiplexer.7 On the right is the other input to the multiplexer. The output is taken from the middle, between the pairs of the transistors.

Note that the multiplexer's circuit is opposite, in a way, to a logic gate. In a logic gate, you want either the NMOS transistor on or the PMOS transistor on, so the output is pulled low or high respectively. This is accomplished by giving the signals on the transistor gates the same polarity, so the same polysilicon line runs through both transistors. In a multiplexer, however, you want the corresponding PMOS and NMOS transistors to turn on at the same time, so they can pass the signal. This requires the signals on the transistor gates to have opposite polarity. One polysilicon line runs through the right PMOS transistor and the left NMOS transistor. The other polysilicon line runs through the left PMOS transistor and the right NMOS transistor, connected by metal wiring (not shown). The multiplexer includes an inverter to provide the necessary signal, but I cropped it out of the diagram below.

The flip-flop

The Pentium makes extensive use of flip-flops. A flip-flop is similar to a latch, except its clock input is edge-sensitive instead of level-sensitive. That is, the flip-flop "remembers" its input at the moment the clock goes from low to high, and provides that value as its output. This difference may seem unimportant, but it turns out to make the flip-flop more useful in counters, state machines, and other clocked circuits.

In the Pentium, a flip-flop is constructed from two latches: a primary latch and a secondary latch. The primary latch passes its value through while the clock is low and holds its value when the clock is high. The output of the primary latch is fed into the secondary latch, which has the opposite clock behavior. The result is that when the clock switches from low to high, the primary latch stops updating its output at the same time that the secondary starts passing this value through, providing the desired flip-flop behavior.

The photo above shows a standard-cell flop-flop, with an intricate pattern of metal wiring connecting the various sub-components. There are a few variants; with minor logic changes, the flip-flop can have "set" or "reset" inputs, bypassing the clock to force the output to the desired state. (Set and reset functions are useful for initializing flip-flops to a desired value, for example when the processor starts up.)

The BiCMOS buffer

Although I've been discussing CMOS circuits so far, the Pentium was built with BiCMOS, a process that allows circuits to use bipolar transistors in addition to CMOS. By adding a few extra processing steps to the regular CMOS manufacturing process, bipolar (NPN and PNP) transistors can be created. The Pentium made extensive use of BiCMOS circuits since they reduced signal delays by up to 35%. Intel also used BiCMOS for the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, and Xeon processors (but not the Pentium MMX). However, as chip voltages dropped, the benefit from bipolar transistors dropped too and BiCMOS was eventually abandoned.

The schematic below shows a standard-cell BiCMOS buffer in the Pentium chip.8 This circuit is more complex than a CMOS buffer: it uses two inverters, an NPN pull-up transistor, an NMOS pull-down transistor, and a PMOS pull-up transistor.9

In the die images below, note the circular structure of the NPN transistor, very different from the linear structure of the NMOS and PMOS transistors and considerably larger. A sign of the buffer's high-current drive capacity is the output's thick metal wiring, much thicker than the typical signal wiring.

Conclusions

Standard-cell layout is extensively used in modern chips. Modern processors, with their nanometer-scale transistors, are much too small to study under a microscope. The Pentium, on the other hand, has features large enough that its circuits can be observed and reverse engineered. Of course, with 3.3 million transistors, the Pentium is too much for me to reverse engineer in depth, but I still find it interesting to study small-scale circuits and see how they were implemented. This post presented a small sample of the standard cells in the Pentium. The full standard-cell library is much larger, with dozens, if not hundreds, of different cells: many types of logic gates in a variety of sizes and drive strengths. But the fundamental design and layout principles are the same as the cells described here.

One unusual feature of the Pentium is its use of BiCMOS circuitry, which had a peak of popularity in the 1990s, right around the era of the Pentium. Although changing tradeoffs made BiCMOS impractical for digital circuitry, BiCMOS still has an important role in analog ICs, especially high-frequency applications. The Pentium in a sense is a time capsule with its use of BiCMOS.

I hope that you have enjoyed this look at some of the Pentium's circuits. I find it reassuring to see that even complex processors are made up of simple transistor circuits and you can observe and understand these circuits if you look closely.

For more on standard-cell circuits, I wrote about standard cells in an IBM chip and standard cells in the 386 (the 386 article has a lot of overlap with this one). Follow me on Twitter @kenshirriff or RSS for updates. I'm also on Mastodon occasionally as @kenshirriff@oldbytes.space.

Notes and references

To use the Montreal subway (the Métro), you tap a paper ticket against the turnstile and it opens. The ticket works through a system called NFC, but what's happening internally? How does the ticket work without a battery? How does it communicate with the turnstile? And how can it be so cheap that you can throw the ticket away after one use? To answer these questions, I opened up a ticket and examined the tiny chip inside.

The image below shows the chip inside the ticket, highly magnified. The four golden squares in the corner are the connections to the antenna. The tan-colored lines are the metal wiring layer on top of the chip; the thickest lines wire the antenna to other parts of the chip. The darker region that takes up the majority of the chip is the chip's digital logic. To the left is the analog circuitry that handles the signal from the antenna.

The chip uses NFC (Near-Field Communication). The idea behind NFC is that a reader (i.e. the turnstile) and an NFC tag (i.e. the ticket) communicate over a short distance through magnetic fields, allowing them to exchange data. The reader generates a magnetic field that both powers the tag and sends data to the tag. Both the reader and the tag have coil-like antennas so the reader's magnetic field can be picked up by the tag.1 When you tap your ticket on the turnstile, the NFC communication happens in 35 milliseconds, faster than an eyeblink. The data provided by the NFC tag shows that you have a valid ticket and then you can enter the subway.

The photo below shows the subway ticket, made of printed paper.2 At the right, the ticket appears to have golden smart-card contacts, like a credit card with an EMV chip. However, those contacts are completely fake, just printed onto the card with ink, and there is no chip there. Presumably, the makers thought that making the card look like a smart card would help people understand it. The card actually uses an entirely different technology.

Although the subway card is paper on the outside, its core is a thin plastic sheet, shown below. The sheet has a coiled antenna made from a layer of metal foil. If you look closely, you can see the tiny NFC chip in the lower right, a black speck connected to two sides of the antenna wire.3 The diagonal metal stripe in the upper left makes the antenna into a loop; topologically, a spiral antenna won't work on a 2-D sheet, so the diagonal bridge completes the circuit.

I want to emphasize the absurdly small size of the chip: 570 µm × 485 µm. The photo below shows that it is about the size of a grain of salt. The chip is also extremely thin—75 µm or 120 µm—so you can't even feel the chip inside the ticket.

Functions of the chip

There are many different types of NFC chips with varying levels of functionality. 4 This one is called the MIFARE Ultralight EV1,5 a low-cost chip designed for one-time ticketing applications. The basic function of the Ultralight chip is simple: providing a block of data to the reader. The chip holds its data in a small EEPROM; this chip has 48 bytes of user memory, while another variant has 108 bytes of user memory.

The Ultralight chip lacks the cryptography support found in more advanced chips. The Ultralight isn't much more secure than a printed ticket with a QR code or barcode, like you'd download for a show. It's up to the reader to validate the data and make sure the same ticket isn't being used multiple times.6

The Ultralight chip has a few features beyond a printed ticket, though. The chips are manufactured with a unique 7-byte identification code (UID). Moreover, the UID is signed, ensuring that fake UIDs cannot be generated.7 The chip also supports password-protected memory access and locking of memory pages to prevent modification. Since the password is transmitted without encryption, the security is weak, but better than nothing.8

Another interesting feature of the chip is the one-way counter. The chip has three 24-bit counters that can be incremented but not decremented. The counters can be used to allow the ticket to be used a particular number of times, for instance.9

Photographing the chip

To photograph the chip, I went through several steps to remove the chip from the ticket and then strip the chip down to the bare silicon. First, to extract the plastic sheet with the chip and the antenna from the paper ticket, I simply soaked the ticket in water. This turned the paper into mush, which could be scraped off to reveal the plastic core. Next, I cut out a small square of plastic that included the chip and put it in boiling sulfuric acid for about 30 seconds. This removed the plastic and adhesive, leaving the silicon die. (I try to avoid boiling acids, but processing a tiny chip like this only required a few drops of sulfuric acid, minimizing the risk.)

The die was covered with a passivation layer to protect its surface, a sandwich of silicon nitride and PSG (phosphosilicate glass) 1.1 µm thick according to the datasheet. The chip's underlying circuitry was visible, but slightly hazy due to this layer. I removed the passivation layer by boiling the chip in phosphoric acid for a few minutes. The image below shows the chip after this step. The top metal layer is much more visible, although some of the metal was dissolved by the acid. The thick metal lines connect the four bond pads to various parts of the analog circuitry, while many thin vertical metal lines provide interconnections of the logic circuitry.

Next, I treated the die with several cycles of treatment with Armour Etch to dissolve the oxide layer and hydrochloric acid to dissolve the metal. I think the chip had three layers of metal wiring on top of the silicon. Unfortunately, my process doesn't remove the metal layers cleanly, but causes them to come off in chaotic tangles. Since I wasn't interested in tracing the circuitry layer-by-layer, this wasn't a significant problem.

With the metal layers and polysilicon removed, I was left with the bare silicon. At this point, the underlying structure of the chip is visible. The doped silicon regions show the transistors, although they are extremely small at this scale. The white rectangles are capacitors. The chip has capacitors for many reasons: producing the right resonant frequency with the antenna, filtering the power, and boosting the voltage with charge pumps.

My biggest concern while processing this chip was to avoid losing it. With a chip this small, bumping the chip or even breathing on it can send the chip flying perhaps never to be seen again. Even trying to pick up the chip with tweezers is risky, since it can easily pop out and disappear. It's no fun examining the floor, inch by inch, trying to figure out if a speck is the lost chip or a bit of dirt. I found that the best way to move the chip between processing and a microscope slide was to put the chip in a few drops of water and move it with a pipette. Even so, there were a couple of times that I lost track of the chip and had to check some specks under the microscope to determine which was the chip and which were dirt.

Overview of the chip

The block diagram below shows the high-level structure of the chip. At the left, the antenna is connected to the RF interface, the analog circuitry that converts the high-frequency signals into digital data. This circuitry also extracts power from the antenna's signal to power the chip.

The majority of the chip contains digital logic to process the 18 different commands that it can receive from the reader. Some commands, such as Wake-up or Halt control the chip's state. Other commands, such as Read or Write provide access to the EEPROM storage. The specialized Read_Cnt and Incr_Cnt commands access the chip's counters.

The chip has an "intelligent anticollision function" that allows multiple cards to be read without conflict if they are presented to the reader simultaneously. If a conflict is detected, the reader uses a standard NFC algorithm to select the cards one at a time, based on their identification numbers. The anticollision algorithm uses four of the chip's commands.

Finally, the chip has an EEPROM to store its data. Unlike RAM, the EEPROM holds data even when unpowered; it is designed to hold data for 10 years. To store data in the EEPROM, it must be written with a higher voltage than the rest of the chip uses. The EEPROM interface circuit produces the necessary signals.

The diagram shows the chip with its functional blocks labeled. The majority of the die is occupied with digital logic; I'll explain below how it is implemented with standard-cell logic. At the top is the EEPROM, a square of storage cells. To the right of the EEPROM is a charge pump, a circuit to boost the voltage through switched capacitors. The EEPROM interface circuitry is between the EEPROM and the digital logic.

The remainder of the chip contains analog circuitry that is harder to interpret, so my labels are somewhat speculative. The four bond pads are where the antenna is connected to the chip. There are four pads to support two parallel antennas if desired. The first die photo shows the metal wiring between the bond pads and the structures that I've labeled as RF transistors and RF diodes. The "RF transistors" in the upper left are large, oval-shaped structures. These may be the transistors that send data back to the reader by modifying the load. Alternatively, they could be Zener diodes to regulate the voltage powering the chip, since Zener diodes often have an oval shape. The "RF diodes" at the bottom may rectify the signal from the antenna, producing the power for the chip. The rectified signal is also demodulated and processed by the analog logic to extract the digital data sent from the reader.

Sending data from the tag to the reader: load modulation

You might expect the tag to send data back to the receiver by transmitting a signal through the antenna. However, transmitting a signal takes power and the tag doesn't have much power available, just the power that it extracts from the reader's signal. Instead, the tag uses a clever technique called load modulation to send data to the reader. The idea is that if the tag changes the load across the antenna, it will absorb more or less energy from the reader. The reader can detect this change as a small variation in voltage across its transmitting antenna. Thus, the tag can dynamically change its load to send data back to the reader. Even though the signal produced by load modulation is extremely weak (80 dB less than the transmitted signal), the reader can detect it and extract the data.

In more detail, the reader transmits at a carrier frequency of 13.56 MHz.10 To send data back, the tag switches its load on and off at 848 kHz (1/16 of the carrier frequency), producing a subcarrier on top of the reader's signal. To transmit bits, this load modulation is switched on or off to transmit 106 kilobits per second (1/8 of the modulation frequency). The reader, in turn, extracts the subcarrier with a filter to receive the data bits from the tag.

An NFC tag can apply a load that is either a resistor or a capacitor; a resistor absorbs the signal directly, while a capacitor changes the antenna's resonant frequency and thus the amount of signal transferred to the tag. The die contains many capacitors, but I didn't see any significant resistors, so I suspect that this chip uses a capacitor for the load.

The chip's manufacturing process

The image below shows an extreme closeup of the die. The red box surrounds a region of doped silicon, forming five MOS transistors in series. Each dark vertical line corresponds to the gate of one transistor so the width of this line corresponds to the feature size. I estimate that the chip's feature size is 180 nm. In comparison, the wavelength of visible light is 400-700 nm. Since the features are smaller than the wavelength of light, it's not surprising that image appears blurry.

The 180 nm process was popular in the late 1990s. These features are very large, however, compared to recent chips with features that are a few nanometers across. At the time the MIFARE Ultralight EV1 chip was released (October 2012), the newest semiconductor manufacturing process was 22 nm, so the 180 nm process they used was old even then.

However, it makes sense that the chip would be manufactured with an older process for several reasons. First, much of the chip's area is occupied by analog circuitry and the four bond pads, so shrinking the digital logic won't reduce the overall size much. Moreover, a significantly smaller chip would be impractical to attach to the antenna; I expect even the current chip is a pain to mount. Finally, this chip is designed for the extremely low-cost (i.e. disposable) market, so the chip is manufactured as inexpensively as possible. With a more modern process, more chips would fit on a wafer, dropping the price, but manufacturing each wafer would be more expensive, so there is a tradeoff.

Standard-cell logic

The chip's digital circuitry is implemented with standard-cell logic, a common way of implementing digital logic. The idea behind standard-cell logic is to use automated tools to create the chip layout from a description of the desired logic. The process starts with a library of standard cells. Each cell is a standardized implementation of a simple circuit such as a NAND gate or a flip-flop. The cells are designed so they have a fixed height and can be arranged in rows. The cells are then connected by metal wiring on top of the cells to produce the desired circuitry. Although the resulting circuitry isn't as dense and efficient as a fully customized and optimized layout, standard cell logic is much faster (and thus cheaper) to design than a hand-tuned layout. Thus, standard-cell logic has been heavily used for integrated circuit design since the 1980s.

The photo below shows four rows of gates implemented with standard cell logic, The chip (like most modern chips) uses CMOS logic, with each logic gate built from two types of transistors: NMOS and PMOS. To simplify manufacturing, the NMOS and PMOS transistors are arranged in separate rows. Thus, each row of logic consists of a row of PMOS transistors on top and a row of NMOS transistors below, or vice versa. Due to the physics of semiconductors, the PMOS transistors are larger, which allows the transistor types to be distinguished in the image.

Looking at some of the cells and extrapolating, I estimate about 8000 gates in the logic section with about 45,000 transistors. One question is if the chip is implemented as a hardcoded state machine, or if it contains a processor (microcontroller). The transistor count is barely large enough to implement a simple microcontroller such as an 8051, but that wouldn't leave many transistors left over for other necessary circuitry. If a microcontroller were present, it would need software stored somewhere. Given the simplicity of the protocol and the relatively small number of transistors, my guess is that the chip is implemented in hardware (state machines and counters) rather than through a microcontroller.

The diagram below shows how a standard cell implements a 2-input NAND. (This cell is from the Intel 386, not the NFC chip, but the structures are similar.) The cell contains four transistors. The yellow region is the P-type silicon that forms two PMOS transistors; the transistor gates are where the polysilicon (red) crosses the yellow region. (The middle yellow region is the drain for both transistors; there is no discrete boundary between the transistors.) Likewise, the two NMOS transistors are at the bottom, where the polysilicon (red) crosses the active silicon (green). The blue lines indicate the metal wiring for the cell. The black circles are contacts, connections between the metal and the silicon or polysilicon. Finally, the well taps are the opposite type of silicon, connected to the underlying silicon well or substrate to keep it at the proper voltage.

EEPROM

The chip stores its data in an EEPROM, similar to flash memory. The chip provides 640 or 1312 bits of EEPROM, based on the part number; I believe both versions use the same EEPROM implementation, but the cheaper version limits the amount that can be used. I think the EEPROM is the matrix shown below, with row and column drive circuitry to the right and below. (The diagonal lines are accidental scratches while I was processing the chip.)

In the photo, the EEPROM appears to be a 64×64 grid, 4K bits of storage rather than the advertised 1312 bits. There are several possible explanations. First, I could be miscounting the capacity (it is easy to be off by a factor of 2, depending on the cell structure). Second, the chip stores data that isn't reflected in the EEPROM memory map; for instance, the one-way counters and the UID signature are not included in the EEPROM storage count. Another possibility is that the extra EEPROM space holds code for a microcontroller (if the chip has one).

An EEPROM requires a relatively high voltage (10-20V) to force electrons into the storage cell for a bit. This voltage is generated by a charge pump circuit that switches capacitors at high frequency to boost the voltage. To the right of the EEPROM is a circuit with several large capacitors, presumably the charge pump.

Conclusions

It's remarkable that these NFC chips can be manufactured so cheaply that they are disposable. To keep the price down, the chips are sold by the wafer and then mounted in the tickets.11 You can buy an eight-inch silicon wafer with the chips for $9000 from Digikey. This may seem expensive until you realize that a single wafer provides an astonishing 100,587 chips, yielding a per-chip price of nine cents. According to the datasheet, a wafer has 103,682 potential good dies per wafer (PGDW). Some dies will be faulty, of course, so the wafer comes with a file telling you which dies are the good ones, 97% of them. (During the manufacturing of a typical chip, the faulty ones are marked with a spot of ink. But that won't work in this case since each die is much smaller than an ink spot.) If you need more chips, you can buy a 12" wafer for $19,000, providing 215,712 chips. A ticket manufacturer mounts each chip on an antenna sheet and then prints the ticket, adding a few cents to the cost of the ticket. The result is an inexpensive ticket that can be used once and discarded.

I'll leave you with one last die photo. In my first attempt at processing the chip, I treated it with Armour Etch. Although this failed to remove the passivation layer, it thinned it slightly, enough to generate some wild colors due to thin-film interference. I call this the "tie die".

Follow me on Twitter @kenshirriff or RSS for more. I'm also on Mastodon as oldbytes.space@kenshirriff. If you're interested in this type of chip, a few years ago, I looked at two RFID race timing chips, the Monza R4 and Monza R6.

Notes and references

I recently obtained an aerospace computer from the early 1970s, apparently part of a navigation system. Aerospace computers are an interesting but mostly neglected area of computer hardware, so I'm always delighted to examine one up close. In an era when most computers were large mainframes, aerospace computers packed dense electronics into a small package, using technologies such as surface-mounted components and multi-layer printed circuit boards, technologies that wouldn't reach the mainstream for another decade. This blog post examines the circuitry and components inside this computer, including an unusual electromechanical display. Although I was unable to determine who manufactured this system or even its exact function, this system illustrates how hundreds of integrated circuits and a core memory stack can be crammed into a compact package.

The keyboard

The device has a simple numeric keyboard with a few unexpected features. The numeric keypad can also be used for direction entry, as four of the keys have N, S, E, and W on them. The keys are large, roughly the size of the Apollo spacecraft's DSKY buttons. My theory is that these buttons are designed for operation with gloves, perhaps in a fighter plane where the pilot wears a pressure suit. The buttons are hinged at the top, so they don't push straight in, but pivot when pressed.

Numeric keypads typically use one of two layouts: a telephone-style keypad has the digits 123 at the top, while a calculator-style keypad has the digits 789 at the top. Interestingly, this device uses a calculator layout, while most aviation devices have a telephone layout. The Apollo DSKY also used a calculator layout, which could be a hint at a NASA connection for this device.

Above the keyboard are four codes for self-test: N4576, E9384, S9021, and W4830. Entering these codes on the keyboard presumably triggered the appropriate test of the system when the switch is in test mode.

The display

The computer's display is simple, showing a latitude and longitude. Each value has one decimal position, providing 0.1° of accuracy. The latitude and longitude are prefixed with a compass direction: North/South for latitude and East/West for longitude.

The display is constructed from an unusual type of electromechanical indicator, with an indicator module for each digit. Each digit position has a rotating wheel with 11 positions (ten digits and a blank). When the indicator module for a position is energized, the wheel spins to the specified position, showing the selected digit. The two leftmost indicators are slightly different as they show a compass direction instead of a digit: N, S, E, or W. Moreover, the direction indicators can also show the compass direction with a diagonal slash through it, as seen above. Perhaps the slashed direction indicates a problem with the value.

The diagram below shows how a digit indicator operates. Each digit position has an electromagnet with a wire to energize it. The dial wheel has an attached permanent magnet (indicated by N and S). Energizing one of the electromagnets causes the dial to spin to that position, aligning the permanent magnet on the dial with the electromagnet. This mechanism forms a reliable indicator with just one moving part. The displayed digit is clearer than a seven-segment display since the digit uses a real font rather than being created from segments.

Looking at the back of the keyboard/display unit shows the wiring of the display indicators. Each indicator has a common connection and ten wires to energize one of the electromagnets.1 The electromagnets are connected in a matrix, with all the "1" wires connected, the "2" wires connected, and so forth. To rotate an indicator to a particular digit, a common wire and an electromagnet wire are energized. For instance, powering the common wire of the second indicator and the "5" electromagnetic wire causes the second indicator to rotate to the "5" position. The wiring has a three-dimensional structure with ten bare wires running between the boards, one for each digit value. A yellow wire hangs off each bare wire, linking it to the connector on the left. Each indicator has ten diodes on a circuit board to block "sneak" paths that would energize unselected electromagnets.

This matrix circuit reduces the amount of wiring required: although there are 100 electromagnets in total, just 20 wires are sufficient to control them. The driver circuitry, however, is a bit more complex as it must scan through the ten digit positions, activating the right pair of driver wires at the right time. Some of the logic circuitry described below must implement this scanning, as well as the driver circuitry to energize the indicators.

The display and keyboard have many similarities to the Delco Carousel Inertial Navigation System (INS) shown below. (The Delco Carousel was used in many military and civilian aircraft, from the C-141 cargo plane to the Boeing 747 passenger plane.) Both devices have two digital displays, one for latitude North/South and one for longitude East/West. Also note the numeric keypads with four keys assigned to the four compass directions. The controls of the Carousel INS system are considerably more complicated, though. The Carousel has a knob position "TK/GS" (track/ground speed), which may correspond to the "T/G" position on my device.

Note that the display on my unit has just four digits of accuracy, with one digit after the decimal point. A tenth of a degree would provide an accuracy of about ±7 miles, which is low for a navigation device. In comparison, the Delco Carousel has six digits of accuracy (± 100 feet perhaps). This suggests that the device does not provide INS navigation, but some other guidance with lower accuracy.

Packaging the electronics

The unit contains 14 circuit boards, crammed with TTL integrated circuits, along with a core memory stack. The photo below shows how circuit boards surround the core memory stack. The mechanical design of the unit is advanced, allowing the boards to be opened up like a book. This provides compact packaging while allowing access to the boards.

The circuit boards are four-layer printed circuit boards, more advanced than the common two-layer boards of the time. The boards use a mixture of surface-mounted and through-hole components. The flat-pack ICs and the tiny round transistors are surface mounted, which was rare at the time. On the other hand, the resistors, capacitors, diodes, and larger transistors use standard through-hole components. At the time, most electronics used through-hole components, although aerospace systems often used surface-mounted components for higher density. It wasn't until the late 1980s that surface-mount technology became commonplace.

The boards are mounted in solid metal frames, providing both structural integrity and heat conduction for cooling. Most of the frames hold two boards, mounted back-to-back for higher density.

The logic boards

Four of the circuit boards are logic boards, packed with flat-pack integrated circuits. The board below holds 55 integrated circuits, showing the high density that is possible with flat packs.

The logic ICs are Signetics 400-series chips, an early type of TTL (Transistor-Transistor Logic) chip. Just three types of these ICs are used: SE440J "Dual exclusive OR" (really AND-OR-INVERT but XOR if provided with particular inputs), SE455J "Dual 4-input buffer/driver" (4-input NAND or NOR gates depending on polarity), and SE480J "Quad 2-input NAND/NOR". These integrated circuits cost $15.45 each in 1966 (about $150 each in current dollars).2

The schematic below shows the circuit that implements AND-OR-INVERT (or exclusive or) in the SE440J. The multiple-emitter transistors on the inputs may appear unusual, but this is the standard way to implement TTL gates. It is important to note that this chip only contains 12 transistors, so the density is low. (Since the chip contains two of these gates, this circuit is duplicated.) In the mid-1960s, integrated circuits only contained a few transistors—the Apollo Guidance Computer's ICs had just 6 transistors—but by the time this unit was built in the early 1970s, some chips had thousands of transistors, tracking Moore's Law. Thus, this unit both illustrates how aviation computers could be built from simple integrated circuits and how the dramatic improvements in IC technology rapidly obsoleted these computers.

The Signetics 400-series seems to have been obscure and short-lived, probably killed off by the wild success of 7400-series TTL chips. I was able to find only a few announcements and datasheets for these chips. The only users of these chips that I could find were NASA projects from the late 1960s.3 Signetics 400-series chips were used in the Mariner Mars and Venus probes, in the Data Automation Subsystem (DAS) (link, link). The Voyager Mars probes also used them. The SE455J gates were also used to interface the Apollo Guidance Computer to a core-rope simulator. JPL used the SE455J in a core memory system. NASA used the SE455J, SE480J, and other Signetics chips in its design for the MICROMIN computer. None of these systems appear to be related to the navigation system, but they illustrate that NASA was using these specific Signetics chips at the time in multiple designs.

The chips are labeled "CDC", raising the possibility that these chips were built by Control Data Corporation (CDC) under license from Signetics. The Aerospace Division of CDC was active at the time, building various compact computer systems. For instance, the CDC 480 computer (1976) was a 16-bit computer based on the Am2900 bit-slice chip. Also known as the AN/AYK-14, this system was used on numerous aircraft including the F-18. An earlier CDC aerospace computer is the AN/AWG-9 Airborne Missile Control System (1965), a 24-bit computer in a compact 1.1 cubic foot package. Used on the F-14 fighter plane, this computer guided the Phoenix air-to-air missile. Based on CDC's activity in aerospace computers at the time, the mystery computer could be a CDC system, although this hypothesis is based solely on integrated circuits labeled "CDC".

The photo below shows another logic board. This one has numerous red and white wires attached, linking it to the rest of the system. Curiously, this board has a single transistor, with two associated resistors, in the middle of the board.

Analog boards

The computer contains not only logic boards but also boards full of analog circuitry to interface with the core memory, keyboard, and display. The board below contains 17 of the logic ICs seen earlier. However, it also uses many resistors, capacitors (red cylinders), transistors (white circles), inductors (white banded cylinders), and glass diodes. The board also has some analog integrated circuits. In particular, it has three TI SN52709 op-amps, the smaller 10-pin packages. The board also contains some integrated circuits that I couldn't identify: UT1000, UT1027, UD4001, and D245F. The SM 60 ICs in white packages have a logo that I don't recognize. The op-amps could function as sense amplifiers for the core memory, or this board could provide other analog interfacing.

The board has multiple gray four-pin packages labeled "926D". Based on the + and - markings, these packages are probably bridge rectifiers, maybe providing power for the circuits. Many of the other boards have these rectifiers. The analog boards also contain a few Halex flat-pack devices labeled "HALEX 101205 727". Hanlex manufactured thin-film resistors in flat packs, so these are probably resistor networks. NASA used Halex resistor networks in some devices (link).4

The analog board shown below sits next to the core memory stack. It uses a different set of flat-pack components: Signetics C8930G and PL 98321. Unfortunately, I could not identify these ICs. This board, unlike the previous boards, has a copper ground plane in the second layer of the circuit board; this layer is visible in the photo as the copper-colored background occupying most of the board.

Core memory

The unit is built around a core memory stack, as was common in the era before semiconductor memory took over. Magnetic core memory consists of a grid of tiny ferrite cores with wires threaded through them, forming a core plane. Typically, a core memory unit consists of multiple planes, one for each bit in the word, stacked to form a three-dimensional block of memory.

The photo below shows a closeup of the stack. It appears to have 20 planes, suggesting a 20-bit processor. Soldered wires connect the planes together to provide continuous wiring through the stack. The soldering on these wires looks somewhat haphazard, suggesting that this was not a production unit.

The photo below shows the other side of the core memory stack, with similar wiring between the planes. At the right are a few layers of a different type, connected with 26 wires. The tape measure shows that the core memory stack is compact, about 6 cm on a side (2¼").

Some of the boards are drivers for the core memory stack. The board below has 48 small round transistors, colored either blue or red. Note the green, white, and yellow wires in the lower right, mostly hidden under the brown ground ribbon. These wires are connected to the core memory stack.

The board below also has numerous wires to the core stack, underneath the brown ground ribbon, so it is presumably another driver board. This board has some round driver transistors with yellow dots. Curiously, in the upper left there are a few circuit board pads where transistors could be mounted but are missing. Perhaps with the additional components the board would support a system with more of something: a larger keyboard? more memory?

Looking at the back of the unit, you can see the display indicator wiring at the top and a circuit board at the bottom. This board contains 20 transistors in metal cans, specifically Motorola 2N3736 NPN transistors. The core memory stack has 20 planes, matching the 20 transistors on this board, so the board probably implements the core memory "inhibit drivers", controlling the bit written to each plane. The board also has numerous tiny surface-mount transistors in white, red, and black packages. Close examination shows a few thin green "bodge" wires on this board, indicating that rework was performed on the board to fix a circuit problem, another piece of evidence that this unit is a prototype.

The core memory stack is enclosed by two sheet metal boxes, which I removed for the photos. The stack also has two flexible ground planes attached to it. The designers clearly wanted to ensure that the memory was well shielded, to a degree that I haven't seen in other systems.

Conclusions

Despite my research, this aerospace computer remains a mystery. I was unable to identify who manufactured it or even its exact function. One hypothesis is a NASA connection since NASA was extensively using these Signetics chips at the time. Moreover, this computer was obtained in the Houston area. Another hypothesis, based on the "CDC" label on the chips, is that this computer was built by Control Data's Aerospace Division. If you have any leads on this mysterious aviation computer, please contact me.

This system may have been a prototype. It has no part numbers, manufacturer name, or identifying plate.5 Moreover, the soldering on the core memory stack doesn't seem to be flight quality. Finally, the boards don't have conformal coating, which is typically used for spaceflight systems. However, the mechanical design looks advanced for a prototype, with dense boards that fold together like a book.

This unit clearly has a navigation role, but seems to be too inaccurate for an inertial navigation system (INS). It contains many integrated circuits, but not enough to form a full computer. I hypothesize that this unit contains the circuitry to drive the core memory and the display, and handle keyboard input. Looking at the underside of the unit (below), there are three connectors. I suspect these connectors were plugged into a larger box that held the computer itself.

The date codes on the integrated circuits range from 1966 to 1973, so the computer was probably manufactured in 1973. The seven-year range for date codes is a bit surprising, since integrated circuit technology changed a lot during these years. I suspect that the Signetics 400-series ICs had older date codes because this line didn't catch on so there was a lot of old stock rather than newly-manufactured parts. I also suspect that this system was designed around 1969, based on the multiple NASA systems using these chips then, suggesting that the design and manufacturing of this unit was a multi-year project.

Despite the lingering mysteries of this device, it provides an interesting example of aerospace computers at the beginning of the 1970s. Even though integrated circuits were primitive at the time, with just a few transistors per chip, aerospace computers used these chips and high-density packaging to build computers that were compact, reliable, and low power. These miniature computers controlled aircraft, missiles, and spacecraft, worlds away from the room-filling mainframes that attracted most of the attention.

Thanks to Usagi Electric for providing the aerospace computer. Eric Schlaepfer and Marc Verdiell helped with the analysis. Thanks to Don Straney for his research and comments. Various commenters on Reddit and Twitter provided suggestions. Follow me on Twitter @kenshirriff or RSS for updates. I'm also on Mastodon as oldbytes.space@kenshirriff.

Notes and references

In 1979, Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a variant of the 16-bit 8086 processor. IBM's decision to use the 8088 processor in the IBM PC (1981) was a critical point in computer history, leading to the success of the x86 architecture. The designers of the IBM PC selected the 8088 for multiple reasons, but a key factor was that the 8088 processor's 8-bit bus was similar to the bus of the 8085 processor.1 The designers were familiar with the 8085 since they had selected it for the IBM System/23 Datamaster, a now-forgotten desktop computer, making the more-powerful 8088 processor an easy choice for the IBM PC.

The 8088 processor communicates over the bus with memory and I/O devices through a highly-structured sequence of steps called "T-states." A typical 8088 bus cycle consists of four T-states, with one T-state per clock cycle. Although a four-step bus cycle may sound straightforward, its implementation uses a complicated state machine making it one of the most difficult parts of the 8088 to explain. First, the 8088 has many special cases that complicate the bus cycle. Moreover, the bus cycle is really six steps, with two undocumented "extra" steps to make bus operations more efficient. Finally, the complexity of the bus cycle is largely arbitrary, a consequence of Intel's attempts to make the 8088's bus backward-compatible with the earlier 8080 and 8085 processors. However, investigating the bus cycle circuitry in detail provides insight into the timing of the processor's instructions. In addition, this circuitry illustrates the tradeoffs and implementation decisions that are necessary in a production processor. In this blog post, I look in detail at the circuitry that implements this state machine.

By examining the die of the 8088 microprocessor, I could reverse engineer the bus circuitry. The die photo below shows the 8088 microprocessor's silicon die under a microscope. Most visible in the photo is the metal layer on top of the chip, with the silicon and polysilicon mostly hidden underneath. Around the edges of the die, bond wires connect pads to the chip's 40 external pins. Architecturally, the chip is partitioned into a Bus Interface Unit (BIU) at the top and an Execution Unit (EU) below, with the two units running largely independently. The BIU handles bus communication (memory and I/O accesses), while the Execution Unit (EU) executes instructions. In the diagram, I've labeled the processor's key functional blocks. This article focuses on the bus state machine, highlighted in red, but other parts of the Bus Interface Unit will also play a role.

Although I'm focusing on the 8088 processor in this blog post, the 8086 is mostly the same. The 8086 and 8088 processors present the same 16-bit architecture to the programmer. The key difference is that the 8088 has an 8-bit data bus for communication with memory and I/O, rather than the 16-bit bus of the 8086. For the most part, the 8086 and 8088 are very similar internally, apart from trivial but numerous layout changes on the die. In this article, I'm focusing on the 8088 processor, but most of the description applies to the 8086 as well. Instead of constantly saying "8086/8088", I'll refer to the 8088 and try to point out places where the 8086 is different.

The bus cycle

In this section, I'll describe the basic four-step bus cycles that the 8088 performs.2 To start, the diagram below shows the states for a write cycle (slightly simplified3), when the 8088 writes to memory or an I/O device. The external bus activity is organized as four "T-states", each one clock cycle long and called T1, T2, T3, and T4, with specific actions during each state. During T1, the 8088 outputs the address on the pins. During the T2, T3, and T4 states, the 8088 outputs the data word on the same pins. The external memory or I/O device uses the T states to know when it is receiving address information or data over the bus lines.

For a read, the bus cycle is slightly different from the write cycle, but uses the same four T-states. During T1, the address is provided on the pins, the same as for a write. After that, however, the processor's data pins are "tri-stated" so they float electrically, allowing the external memory to put data on the bus. The processor reads the data at the end of the T3 state.

The purpose of the bus state machine is to move through these four T states for a read or a write. This process may seem straightforward, but (as is usually the case with the 8088) many complications make this process anything but easy. In the next sections, I'll discuss these complications. After that, I'll explain the state machine circuitry with a schematic.

Address calculation

One of the notable (if not hated) features of the 8088 processor is segmentation: the processor supports 1 megabyte of memory, but memory is partitioned into segments of 64 KB for compatibility with the earlier 8080 and 8085 processors. The 8088 calculates each 20-bit memory address by adding the value of a segment register to a 16-bit offset. This calculation is done by a dedicated address adder in the Bus Interface Unit, completely separate from the chip's ALU. (This address adder can be spotted in the upper left of the earlier die photo.)

Calculating the memory address complicates the bus cycle. As the timing diagrams above show, the processor issues the memory address during state T1 of the bus cycle. However, it takes time to perform the address calculation addition, so the address calculation must take place before T1. To accomplish this, there are two "invisible" bus states before T1; I call these states "TS" (T-start) and "T0". During these states, the Bus Interface Unit uses the address adder to compute the address, so the address will be available during the T1 state. These states are invisible to the external circuitry because they don't affect the signals from the chip.

Thus, a single memory operation takes six clock cycles: two preparatory cycles to compute the address before the four visible cycles. However, if multiple memory operations are performed, the operations are overlapped to achieve a degree of pipelining that improves performance. Specifically, the address calculation for the next memory operation takes place during the last two clock cycles of the current memory operation, saving two clock cycles. That is, for consecutive bus cycles, T3 and T4 of one bus cycle overlap with TS and T0 of the next cycle. In other words, during T3 and T4 of one bus cycle, the memory address gets computed for the next bus cycle. This pipelining significantly improves the performance of the 8088, compared to taking 6 clock cycles for each bus cycle.

With this timing, the address adder is free during cycles T1 and T2. To improve performance in another way, the 8088 uses the adder during this idle time to increment or decrement memory addresses. For instance, after popping a word from the stack, the stack pointer needs to be incremented by 2.5 Another case is block move operations (string operations), which need to increment or decrement the pointers each step. By using the address adder, the new pointer value is calculated "for free" as part of the memory cycle, without using the processors regular ALU.4

Address corrections

The address adder is used in one more context: correcting the Instruction Pointer value. Conceptually, the Instruction Pointer (or Program Counter) register points to the next instruction to execute. However, since the 8088 prefetches instructions, the Instruction Pointer indicates the next instruction to be fetched. Thus, the Instruction Pointer typically runs ahead of the "real" value. For the most part, this doesn't matter. This discrepancy becomes an issue, though, for a subroutine call, which needs to push the return address. It is also an issue for a relative branch, which jumps to an address relative to the current execution position.

To support instructions that need the next instruction address, the 8088 implements a micro-instruction CORR, which corrects the Instruction Pointer. This micro-instruction subtracts the length of the prefetch queue from the Instruction Pointer to determine the "real" Instruction Pointer. This subtraction is performed by the address adder, using correction constants that are stored in a small Constant ROM.

The tricky part is ensuring that using the address adder for correction doesn't conflict with other uses of the adder. The solution is to run a special shortened memory cycle—just the TS and T0 states—while the CORR micro-instruction is performed.6 These states block a regular memory cycle from starting, preventing a conflict over the address adder.

Prefetching

The 8088 prefetches instructions before they are needed, loading instructions from memory into a 4-byte prefetch queue. Prefetching usually improves performance, but can result in an instruction's memory access being delayed by a prefetch, hurting overall performance. To minimize this delay, a bus request from an instruction will preempt a prefetch, even if the prefetch has gone through TS and T0. At that point, the prefetch hasn't created any bus activity yet (which first happens in T1), so preempting the prefetch can be done cleanly. To preempt the prefetch, the bus cycle state machine jumps back to TS, skipping over T1 through T4, and starting the desired access.

A prefetch will also be preempted by the micro-instruction that stops prefetching (SUSP) or the micro-instruction that corrects addresses (CORR). In these cases, there is no point in completing the prefetch, so the state machine cycle will end with T0.

Wait states

One problem with memory accesses is that the memory may be slower than the system's clock speed, a characteristic of less-expensive memory chips. The solution in the 1970s was "wait states". If the memory couldn't respond fast enough, it would tell the processor to add idle clock cycles called wait states, until the memory could respond.7 To produce a wait state, the memory (or I/O device) lowers the processor's READY pin until it is ready to proceed. During this time, the Bus Interface Unit waits, although the Execution Unit continues operation if possible. Although Intel's documentation gives the wait cycle a separate name (Tw), internally the wait is implemented by repeating the T3 state as long as the READY pin is not active.

Halts

Another complication is that the 8088 has a HALT instruction that halts program execution until an interrupt comes in. One consequence is that HALT stops bus operations (specifically prefetching, since stopping execution will automatically stop instruction-driven bus operations). A complication is that the 8088 indicates the HALT state to external devices by performing a special T1 bus cycle without any following bus cycles. But wait: there's another complication. External devices can take control of the bus through the HOLD functionality, allowing external devices to perform operations such as DMA (Direct Memory Access). When the device ends the HOLD, the 8088 performs another special T1 bus cycle, indicating that the HALT is still in effect. Thus, the bus state machine must generate these special T1 states based on HALT and HOLD actions. (I discussed the HALT process in detail here.)