The

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

FOCUS microprocessor, launched in 1982, was the first commercial, single chip, fully

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in 32-bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform large calculation ...

microprocessor available on the market. At this time, all

competitors ( DEC, IBM, Prime Computer, etc.) used multi-chip bit-slice-CPU designs, while single-chip designs like the

Motorola 68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector ...

were a mix of 32 and 16-bit. Introduced in the Hewlett-Packard HP 9000 Series 500 workstations and servers (originally launched as the HP 9020 and also, unofficially, called HP 9000 Series 600), the single-chip CPU was used alongside the I/O Processor (IOP), Memory Controller (MMU), Clock, and a number of 128-kilobit dynamic RAM devices as the basis of the HP 9000 system architecture. It was a 32-bit implementation of the

16-bit 16-bit microcomputers are microcomputers that use 16-bit microprocessors. A 16-bit register can store 216 different values. The range of integer values that can be stored in 16 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two mos ...

HP 3000 computer's stack architecture, with over 220 instructions (some 32 bits wide, some 16 bits wide), a segmented memory model, and no general purpose programmer-visible registers. The design of the FOCUS CPU was richly inspired by the custom silicon on sapphire (SOS) chip design HP used in their HP 3000 series machines. Because of the high density of HP's NMOS-III IC process, heat dissipation was a problem. Therefore, the chips were mounted on special

printed circuit board A printed circuit board (PCB; also printed wiring board or PWB) is a medium used in Electrical engineering, electrical and electronic engineering to connect electronic components to one another in a controlled manner. It takes the form of a L ...

s, with a ~1 mm copper sheet at its core, called "finstrates". The Focus CPU is

microcode In processor design, microcode (μcode) is a technique that interposes a layer of computer organization between the central processing unit (CPU) hardware and the programmer-visible instruction set architecture of a computer. Microcode is a laye ...

d with a 9,216 by 38-bit microcode control store. Internal data paths and registers are all 32-bit wide. The Focus CPU has a transistor count of 450,000 FETs.

References

* See for HP Journal articles. * * FOCUS Stack machines 32-bit microprocessors {{compu-hardware-stub