Panafacom was a

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circ ...

design firm formed on 2 July 1973 by a consortium including Fujitsu,

Fuji Electric , operating under the brand name FE, is a Japanese electrical equipment company, manufacturing pressure transmitters, flowmeters, gas analyzers, controllers, inverters, pumps, generators, ICs, motors, and power equipment. History Fuji Electric ...

and Matsushita (Panasonic). The company was formed to design and manufacture the MN1610, a

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 mo ...

. It was released in April 1975, beating the

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globa ...

TMS9900 Introduced in June 1976, the TMS9900 was one of the first commercially available, single-chip 16-bit microprocessors. It implemented Texas Instruments' TI-990 minicomputer architecture in a single-chip format, and was initially used for low-end m ...

to become the world's first single-chip 16-bit microprocessor. The design saw relatively little use and remains largely unknown in the computer field. In 1987, Panafacom was merged with USAC Electronic Industrial to form today's PFU Limited.

References

External links

L-16A CPU
A description (in Japanese) of the MN1610 processor.

A description (in Japanese) of the MN1613 processor. {{corp-stub 16-bit microprocessors