Silicon Logos
From comp.arch Fri Feb 28 22:31:13 1992 Subject: Re: History of Motorola x8000 line. In article <0105010F.su40ai@mpr.mpr.com> Michael Slater writes: >In article <1992Feb23.224655@apus.ch> Andreas Merz writes: >> I'm not 100% sure, but i beleave: >> The project name of the 88K was first 78K. They had changed it during >> development, but i don't know why (maybe only for marketing reasons). > >This is true. In fact, if you look closely at the 88000 die photo >(at least the early ones) you can see the 78000 designation. Apparently >it was changed because of a conflict with a device from a Japanese >vendor. The first silicon for the the 88100 did have the name 78000 designation. As we got closer to an announcement the marketers and lawyers realized we were for real and started getting up to speed. They found that someone, I believe NEC, had a family of microcontroller called the 78000 series or something like that so they decided to change the name. The decision was made at the request of marketing to keep the part number (88100) different from the family name (88000). So on the next full layer change we changed the part number to 88100, but just to show our displeasure the 78000 designation was left on and was crossed out with a diagonal (or maybe an x) of metal and the 88100 number was placed above it on the die. This probably would have gone unnoticed by upper management except the fab screamed very loud when they found the non 45 degree angles on the cross out which violated the design rules. Also as Hunter Scales mentioned in a previous posting, I believe the original part number was 76000 internally for a couple of months, but my memory is real fuzzy that far back. -- Marvin Denman, Motorola 88000 Design From comp.arch Fri Feb 28 22:32:33 1992 Subject: Re: History of Motorola x8000 line. Well, there was the time when I worked at GEC (England), where a chip designer of the Christian persuasion decided to put a fish logo onto his chip. This was all very well, but he also drew bubbles coming from its mouth as CIRCLES. This didn't get noticed (no design rules were violated), until the mask shop called to ask if the circle that their machine had been trying to fracture for the past 24 hours did anything important. After that the suits absolutely forbade logos. Before this unfortunate occurance, we had a pretty good collection of logos that made it to silicon/sapphire, including a skull & crossbones, the Belgrano, someone's house (drawn by his kid daughter). - Mark Gonzales, Intel Corp.