Hudson Fab
   HOME
*





Hudson Fab
The Hudson Fab was a semiconductor fabrication factory in Hudson, Massachusetts, opened in 1979 by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). For many years it produced some of the most complex integrated circuits in the world, as part of the microVAX and related product lines. It underwent a major upgrade in 1994, but DEC's fortunes were already in decline by this point. In 1997, DEC launched a lawsuit against Intel over the Intel Itanium design, which DEC claimed violated a number of their patents related to HyperThreading. The outcome was that Intel purchased the plant and rights to the DEC's current DEC Alpha and StrongARM designs for $700 million in October 1997. This was part of a wider breakup of DEC being carried out by DEC CEO Robert Palmer, completed in 1998 with the sale of the core of the company to Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, s ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Semiconductor Fabrication
Semiconductor device fabrication is the process used to manufacture semiconductor devices, typically integrated circuit (IC) chips such as modern computer processors, microcontrollers, and memory chips such as NAND flash and DRAM that are present in everyday electrical and electronic devices. It is a multiple-step sequence of photolithographic and chemical processing steps (such as surface passivation, thermal oxidation, planar diffusion and junction isolation) during which electronic circuits are gradually created on a wafer made of pure semiconducting material. Silicon is almost always used, but various compound semiconductors are used for specialized applications. The entire manufacturing process takes time, from start to packaged chips ready for shipment, at least six to eight weeks (tape-out only, not including the circuit design) and is performed in highly specialized semiconductor fabrication plants, also called foundries or fabs. All fabrication takes place inside a c ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Hudson, Massachusetts
Hudson is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, with a total population of 20,092 as of the 2020 census. Before its incorporation as a town in 1866, Hudson was a neighborhood and unincorporated village of Marlborough, Massachusetts, and was known as Feltonville. From around 1850 until the last shoe factory burned down in 1968, Halprin 2001: p. 7 Hudson was a mill town specializing in the production of shoes and related products. At one point the town had 17 shoe factories, Halprin 2008: pp. 7–10 many of them powered by the Assabet River, which runs through town. The many factories in Hudson attracted immigrants from Canada and Europe. Today most residents are of either Portuguese or Irish descent, with a smaller percentage being of French, Italian, English, or Scotch-Irish descent. While some manufacturing remains in Hudson, the town is now primarily residential. Hudson is served by the Hudson Public Schools district. History Pre-European and colonial In ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline. The company produced many different product lines over its history. It is best known for the work in the minicomputer market starting in the mid-1960s. The company produced a series of machines known as the PDP line, with the PDP-8 and PDP-11 being among the most successful minis in history. Their success was only surpassed by another DEC product, the late-1970s VAX "supermini" systems that were designed to replace the PDP-11. Although a number of competitors had successfully competed with Digital through the 1970s, the VAX cemented the company's place as a leading vendor in the computer space. As microcomputers improved in the late 1980s, especially wit ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Integrated Circuit
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny MOSFETs (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors) integrate into a small chip. This results in circuits that are orders of magnitude smaller, faster, and less expensive than those constructed of discrete electronic components. The IC's mass production capability, reliability, and building-block approach to integrated circuit design has ensured the rapid adoption of standardized ICs in place of designs using discrete transistors. ICs are now used in virtually all electronic equipment and have revolutionized the world of electronics. Computers, mobile phones and other home appliances are now inextricable parts of the structure of modern societies, made possible by the small size and low cost of ICs such as modern computer ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


MicroVAX
The MicroVAX is a discontinued family of low-cost minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The first model, the MicroVAX I, was introduced in 1983.(announced October 1983) They used processors that implemented the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA) and were succeeded by the VAX 4000. Many members of the MicroVAX family had corresponding VAXstation variants, which primarily differ by the addition of graphics hardware. The MicroVAX family supports Digital's VMS and ULTRIX operating systems. Prior to VMS V5.0, MicroVAX hardware required a dedicated version of VMS named MicroVMS. MicroVAX I The MicroVAX I, code named "''Seahorse''", introduced in October 1984, was one of DEC's first VAX computers to use very-large-scale integration (VLSI) technology. The KA610 CPU module (also known as the KD32) contained two custom chips which implemented the ALU and FPU while TTL chips were used for everything else. Two variants of the floating point ch ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 series of instruction sets, the instruction sets found in most personal computers (PCs). Incorporated in Delaware, Intel ranked No. 45 in the 2020 ''Fortune'' 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue for nearly a decade, from 2007 to 2016 fiscal years. Intel supplies microprocessors for computer system manufacturers such as Acer, Lenovo, HP, and Dell. Intel also manufactures motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors and other devices related to communications and computing. Intel (''int''egrated and ''el''ectronics) was founded on July 18, 1968, by semiconductor pioneers Gordon Moore (of Moore's law) and Robert Noyce ( ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Intel Itanium
Itanium ( ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Launched in June 2001, Intel marketed the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems. The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly developed by HP and Intel. Itanium-based systems were produced by HP/Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) (the HPE Integrity Servers line) and several other manufacturers. In 2008, Itanium was the fourth-most deployed microprocessor architecture for enterprise-class systems, behind x86-64, Power ISA, and SPARC. In February 2017, Intel released the final generation, Kittson, to test customers, and in May began shipping in volume. It was used exclusively in mission-critical servers from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. In 2019, Intel announced that new orders for Itanium would be accepted until January 30, 2020, and shipments would cease by July 29, 20 ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

HyperThreading
Hyper-threading (officially called Hyper-Threading Technology or HT Technology and abbreviated as HTT or HT) is Intel's proprietary simultaneous multithreading (SMT) implementation used to improve parallelization of computations (doing multiple tasks at once) performed on x86 microprocessors. It was introduced on Xeon server processors in February 2002 and on Pentium 4 desktop processors in November 2002. Since then, Intel has included this technology in Itanium, Atom, and Core 'i' Series CPUs, among others. For each processor core that is physically present, the operating system addresses two virtual (logical) cores and shares the workload between them when possible. The main function of hyper-threading is to increase the number of independent instructions in the pipeline; it takes advantage of superscalar architecture, in which multiple instructions operate on separate data in parallel. With HTT, one physical core appears as two processors to the operating system, a ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


DEC Alpha
Alpha (original name Alpha AXP) is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Alpha was designed to replace 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computers (CISC) and to be a highly competitive RISC processor for Unix workstations and similar markets. Alpha is implemented in a series of microprocessors originally developed and fabricated by DEC. These microprocessors are most prominently used in a variety of DEC workstations and servers, which eventually formed the basis for almost all of their mid-to-upper-scale lineup. Several third-party vendors also produced Alpha systems, including PC form factor motherboards. Operating systems that support Alpha included OpenVMS (formerly named OpenVMS AXP), Tru64 UNIX (formerly named DEC OSF/1 AXP and Digital UNIX), Windows NT (discontinued after NT 4.0; and prerelease Windows 2000 RC2), Linux ( Debian, SUSE, Gentoo and Red Hat), BSD UNIX ( Ne ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




StrongARM
The StrongARM is a family of computer microprocessors developed by Digital Equipment Corporation and manufactured in the late 1990s which implemented the ARM v4 instruction set architecture. It was later acquired by Intel in 1997 from DEC's own Digital Semiconductor division as part of a settlement of a lawsuit between the two companies over plagiarism. Intel then continued to manufacture it before replacing it with the StrongARM-derived ARM-based follow-up architecture called XScale in the early 2000s. History According to Allen Baum, the StrongARM traces its history to attempts to make a low-power version of the DEC Alpha, which DEC's engineers quickly concluded was not possible. They then became interested in designs dedicated to low-power applications which led them to the ARM family. One of the only major users of the ARM for performance-related products at that time was Apple, whose Newton device was based on the ARM platform. DEC approached Apple wondering if they migh ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Robert Palmer (computer Businessman)
Robert B. Palmer (born September 11, 1940) is an American businessman in the computer industry. Palmer was the final Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Digital Equipment Corporation. Education Palmer majored in Math and Physics at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. Career Mostek Corporation Palmer was a founder of Mostek Corporation, founded in 1969 by former employees of Texas Instruments. Mostek manufactured logic, memory, and microprocessor chips. In 1980, United Technologies Corporation (UTC) acquired Mostek Corporation, and Palmer became executive vice president of semiconductor operations. Digital Equipment Corporation In 1985, Palmer joined Digital, and in 1992, he was appointed president and chief executive officer (CEO). From 1995 to 1998, Palmer served as chairman of the board until Digital was sold to Compaq. Digital Equipment Corporation restructuring From 1993 to 1998, Palmer undertook numerous restructurings, massive layoffs of more than 60,000 people ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Compaq
Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compatible computers, being the second company after Columbia Data Products to legally reverse engineer the IBM Personal Computer. It rose to become the largest supplier of PC systems during the 1990s before being overtaken by Dell in 2001. Struggling to keep up in the price wars against Dell, as well as with a risky acquisition of DEC, Compaq was acquired for US$25 billion by HP in 2002. The Compaq brand remained in use by HP for lower-end systems until 2013 when it was discontinued. Since 2013, the brand is currently licensed to third parties for use on electronics in Brazil and India. The company was formed by Rod Canion, Jim Harris, and Bill Murto, all of whom were former Texas Instruments senior managers. ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]