Very interesting article, and a good topic.
Any idea how big the design team was? I would expect at least two but can imagine up to twenty people.
And wonder if the masks were manually prepped.
Any idea how big the design team was? I would expect at least two but can imagine up to twenty people.
And wonder if the masks were manually prepped.
It wouldn't have been possible to make the masks for the 4K chip by hand because hand-cut masks wouldn't be accurate enough. The problem was that the sense amps need to distinguish tiny voltage differences. If you cut the sense lines by hand, they would be slightly different widths, enough to mess up the signals.
The conference paper on this memory chip was authored by Schroeder and Proebsting of Mostek, so there were two main designers. There must have been more people on the team, but I couldn't find the size.
https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/digital-logic/12/...
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~hunt/class/2016-spring/cs350c/doc...
They had a minicomputer with a hardware rasterizer driving a laser writing to photosensitive film. They had amazing throughput for the day.
One of the issues was temperature and humidity stability of the film. It would change dimensions with as little as 10% change in humidity.
The change was more than the resolution of the laser.