The Legend | Intel 4004

Intel 4004

The first electronic computer filled an entire room. But something the size of a fingernail put all that power in people’s hands. Yup !! We are talking about Microprocessor. In this "Tales Of Legends" series, today we will talk about the Intel 4004 Microprocessor, which was the predecessor to smaller, stronger, cheaper microchips. It showed that it was possible to put all of a computer’s processing onto a tiny slice of silicon. In doing so, it not only transformed existing devices, it helped create new ones, which is a remarkable event in the Computer history.

And astonishingly it was all kind of an accident. As a small startup in 1969, Intel was looking to increase funding for its primary objective: making memory chips. So it accepted an offer from Japanese electronics maker Busicom to build several custom chips for the company’s new line of calculators. Behind schedule and lacking resources, Intel’s three-person team scrambled to deliver a family of four chips for the calculator, including the central processing unit chip that would become the famous 4004.

In 1969, Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation approached Intel to design 12 custom chips for its new Busicom 141-PF printing calculator. Intel engineers suggested a family of just four chips, including one that could be programmed for use in a variety of products, setting in motion an engineering feat that dramatically altered the course of electronics and also the history of modern computing era.

By the time it was completed in 1971, the chip could perform different functions on a range of devices beyond Busicom’s calculator. It could be programmed to operate a pinball machine, for example. As Intel began to realize the possibilities of the technology, it made a deal with Busicom to secure the rights to develop the chip for other products and markets.

Intel purchased the rights from Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation and launched the Intel® 4004 processor and its chipset with an advertisement in the November 15, 1971, issue of Electronic News: "Announcing A New Era In Integrated Electronics." And this title works like a charm by the magnificent working speed of the Intel 4004 at that time.

Intel co-founder Andrew Grove and his team continued to iterate on chip technology, and in 1981 IBM chose Intel’s 8088 chip to power its personal computer which is the device that would eventually revolutionize the PC market. By 2011, Intel’s share of the microchip market for PCs hit 80 percent. Today, microprocessors are ubiquitous, from mobile devices to home appliances, livestock ear tags to industrial equipment. Companies are cranking out chips so small and so sophisticated, some can even be implanted in people, transforming their hands into virtual wallets.

That’s when the Intel® 4004 became the first general-purpose programmable processor on the market which works as a "building block" that engineers could purchase and then customize with software to perform different functions in a wide variety of electronic devices.

This revolutionary microprocessor, the size of a little fingernail, delivered the same computing power as the first electronic computer built in 1946, which filled an entire room. Now that's called Modernization, isn't it ?

The Intel 4004 is a 4-bit central processing unit (CPU) released by Intel Corporation in 1971. It was the first monolithic processor, fully integrated in one small chip. Such a type of integration was made possible by the use of the new silicon gate technology which is much known as SGD for integrated circuits, originally developed by Faggin at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968. It allowed twice the number of random-logic transistors and an increase in speed by a factor of five compared to the incumbent MOS aluminum gate technology.

The first Intel® 4004 microprocessor was produced on two-inch wafers compared to the 12-inch wafers commonly used for today's products. It is unique for it is one of the smallest microprocessor designs that ever went into commercial production.

In 1971, the Intel® 4004 processor held 2,300 transistors. By 2010, an Intel® Core™ processor with a 32 nanometer processing die and second-generation high-k metal gate silicon technology held 560 million transistors.

The 4004 employs a 10 µm process silicon-gate enhancement load pMOS technology on a 12 mm² die and can execute approximately 92,000 instructions per second where a single instruction cycle is 10.8 microseconds. The original clock rate design goal was 1 MHz, the same as the IBM 1620 Model I.

The Intel® 4004 microprocessor circuit line width was 10 microns, or 10,000 nanometers. Today, the circuit features of Intel® microprocessors range between 45 and 32 nanometers. By comparison, an average human hair is 100,000 nanometers wide. It was designed by physically cutting sheets of Rubylith into thin strips to lay out the circuits to be printed which is the process that looks like obsolete by current computer graphic design capabilities.

Numerous versions of the Intel MCS-4 line of processors were produced. The earliest versions, marked C, like C4004, were ceramic and used a zebra pattern of white and gray on the back of the chips, often called "grey traces". The next generation of the chips was plain white ceramic, also marked C, and then dark grey ceramic D. Many of the more recent versions of MCS-4 family were also produced with plastic P.

A popular myth has it that Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to leave the solar system, used an Intel 4004 microprocessor. According to Dr. Larry Lasher of Ames Research Center, the Pioneer team did evaluate the 4004, but decided it was too new at the time to include in any of the Pioneer projects. But it became again a topic of discussion when the myth was repeated by Federico Faggin himself in a lecture for the Computer History Museum in 2006.

On 15 November 2006, the 35th anniversary of the 4004, Intel celebrated by releasing the chip's schematics, mask works, and user manual. A fully functional replica of the Intel 4004 was built using discrete transistors and put on display in 2006 at the Intel Museum in Santa Clara, California.

On October 15, 2010, Faggin, Hoff, and Mazor were awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by US President Barack Obama for their pioneering work on the 4004.

Image Courtesy : National Science Foundation, USA

That's all guys. That's the tale of our first legend. More legends to come. So, stay tuned. You can suggest me which legend you want that we will discuss here. Let me know your valuable thoughts by comments. Next time I'll come up with another topic. Till then, Stay Happy. PEACE !!