Am2900 is a family of

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 ...

s (ICs) created in 1975 by

Advanced Micro Devices Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufact ...

(AMD). They were constructed with bipolar devices, in a

bit-slice Bit slicing is a technique for constructing a processor from modules of processors of smaller bit width, for the purpose of increasing the word length; in theory to make an arbitrary ''n''-bit central processing unit (CPU). Each of these com ...

topology, and were designed to be used as modular components each representing a different aspect of a computer

control unit The control unit (CU) is a component of a computer's central processing unit (CPU) that directs the operation of the processor. A CU typically uses a binary decoder to convert coded instructions into timing and control signals that direct the ope ...

(CCU). By using the

bit slicing Bit slicing is a technique for constructing a processor from modules of processors of smaller bit width, for the purpose of increasing the word length; in theory to make an arbitrary ''n''-bit central processing unit (CPU). Each of these com ...

technique, the Am2900 family was able to implement a CCU with data, addresses, and instructions to be any multiple of 4 bits by multiplying the number of ICs. One major problem with this modular technique was that it required a larger number of ICs to implement what could be done on a single CPU IC. The Am2901 chip was the

arithmetic logic unit In computing, an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) is a Combinational logic, combinational digital circuit that performs arithmetic and bitwise operations on integer binary numbers. This is in contrast to a floating-point unit (FPU), which operates on ...

(ALU), and the "core" of the series. It could count using 4 bits and implement binary operations as well as various bit-shifting operations. The 2901 and some other chips in the family were

second source In the electronics industry, a second source is a company that is licensed to manufacture and sell components originally designed by another company (the first source). It is common for engineers and purchasers to avoid components that are only av ...

d by an unusually large number of other manufacturers, starting with Motorola and then Raytheon both in 1975 and also Cypress Semiconductor, National Semiconductor, NEC, Thomson, and Signetics. In the Soviet Union and later Russia the Am2900 family was manufactured as the 1804 series (with e.g. the Am2901 designated as KR1804VS1 / russian: КР1804ВС1, italic=yes) which was known to be in production in 2016.

Computers made with Am2900-family chips

There are probably many more, but here are some known machines using these parts: * The

Apollo Computer Apollo Computer Inc., founded in 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, by William Poduska (a founder of Prime Computer) and others, developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and Sun Microsystems, Apollo wa ...

Tern family: DN460, DN660 and DSP160. All used the same system board emulating the

Motorola 68010 The Motorola MC68010 processor is a 16/32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1982 as the successor to the Motorola 68000. It fixes several small flaws in the 68000, and adds a few features. The 68010 is pin-compatible with the 68000, ...

instruction set. * The

Itek Itek Corporation was a United States defense contractor that initially specialized in camera systems for spy satellites and various other reconnaissance systems. In the early 1960s they built a conglomerate in a fashion similar to LTV or Litto ...

Advanced Technology Airborne Computer (ATAC) used on the

Galileo Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. Commonly referred to as Galileo, his name was pronounced (, ). He was ...

Attitude and Articulation Control Computer System and some Navy aircraft had a 16-register, 16-bit word width assembled from 4-bit-wide 2900 series processors. Four special instructions were added to the Galileo version of the ATAC, and later some chips were replaced with

radiation-hardened Radiation hardening is the process of making electronic components and circuits resistant to damage or malfunction caused by high levels of ionizing radiation ( particle radiation and high-energy electromagnetic radiation), especially for environ ...

2901 chips. *

Data General Nova The Data General Nova is a series of 16-bit minicomputers released by the American company Data General. The Nova family was very popular in the 1970s and ultimately sold tens of thousands of units. The first model, known simply as "Nova", was ...

4, which obtained 16-bit word width using four Am2901 ALUs in parallel; one of the boards had 15 Am2901 ALUs on it. *

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 unt ...

(DEC)

PDP-11 The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a set of products in the Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sold, ...

models PDP-11/23, PDP-11/34, and PDP-11/44 floating-point options (FPF11, FP11-A and FP11-F, respectively). * The DEC VAX 11/730, which used eight AM2901s for the CPU. *

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 ...

1000 A-series model A600 used four AM2901 ALUs for its 16-bit processor * The Xerox Dandelion, the machine used in the

Xerox Star The Xerox Star workstation, officially named Xerox 8010 Information System, is the first commercial personal computer to incorporate technologies that have since become standard in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based ...

and Xerox 1108

Lisp machine Lisp machines are general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software and programming language, usually via hardware support. They are an example of a high-level language computer architecture, and in a sense, the ...

. * Several models of the

GEC 4000 series The GEC 4000 was a series of 16/ 32-bit minicomputers produced by GEC Computers Ltd in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. History GEC Computers was formed in 1968 as a business unit of the GEC conglomerate. It ...

minicomputers: 4060, 4150, 4160 (four Am2901 each, 16-bit ALU), and 4090 and all 418x and 419x systems (eighteen Am2901 each, 32-bit integer ALU or 8-bit exponent, 64-bit Double Precision floating point ALU). * The DEC KS10

PDP-10 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...

model. * The

UCSD Pascal UCSD Pascal is a Pascal programming language system that runs on the UCSD p-System, a portable, highly machine-independent operating system. UCSD Pascal was first released in 1977. It was developed at the University of California, San Diego (UCS ...

P-machine processor designed at NCR by

Joel McCormack Joel McCormack is the designer of the NCR Corporation version of the p-code machine, which is a kind of stack machine popular in the 1970s as the preferred way to implement new computing architectures and languages such as Pascal and BCPL. The NC ...

. * A number of

MAI Basic Four MAI Basic Four (sometimes written as Basic/Four Corporation or Basic 4) refers to a variety of Business Basic, the computers that ran it, and the company that sold them (its name at various times given as MAI Systems, MAI Basic Four Inc., and MAI B ...

machines. * The Tektronix 4052 graphics system computer. * The

SM-1420 The SM-1420 (CM-1420) is a 16 bit DEC PDP-11/45 minicomputer clone, and the successor to SM-4 in Soviet Bloc countries. Under the direction of Minpribor it was produced in the Soviet Union and Bulgaria from 1983 onwards, and is more than twice as f ...

, Soviet clone of PDP-11, used Soviet clone of AM2901 perhaps also used in others. * The

Lilith Lilith ( ; he, Wiktionary:לילית, לִילִית, Līlīṯ) is a female figure in Mesopotamian Mythology, Mesopotamian and Jewish mythology, Judaic mythology, alternatively the first wife of Adam and supposedly the primordial she-demon. ...

computer designed at

ETH Zürich (colloquially) , former_name = eidgenössische polytechnische Schule , image = ETHZ.JPG , image_size = , established = , type = Public , budget = CHF 1.896 billion (2021) , rector = Günther Dissertori , president = Joël Mesot , ac ...

Niklaus Wirth Niklaus Emil Wirth (born 15 February 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist. He has designed several programming languages, including Pascal (programming language), Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he w ...

. *

Atari Atari () is a brand name that has been owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by French publisher Atari SA through a subsidiary named Atari Interactive. The original Atari, Inc. (1972–1992), Atari, Inc., ...

vector graphics Vector graphics is a form of computer graphics in which visual images are created directly from geometric shapes defined on a Cartesian plane, such as points, lines, curves and polygons. The associated mechanisms may include vector display a ...

arcade machines ''

Tempest Tempest is a synonym for a storm. '' The Tempest'' is a play by William Shakespeare. Tempest or The Tempest may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Films * ''The Tempest'' (1908 film), a British silent film * ''The Tempest'' (1911 film), a ...

'', '' Battlezone'', and ''

Red Baron Red is the color at the long wavelength end of the visible spectrum of light, next to orange and opposite violet. It has a dominant wavelength of approximately 625–740 nanometres. It is a primary color in the RGB color model and a secondary ...

'' each used 4 Am2901 ICs in their "math box" auxiliary circuit boards. *

raster graphics upright=1, The Smiley, smiley face in the top left corner is a raster image. When enlarged, individual pixels appear as squares. Enlarging further, each pixel can be analyzed, with their colors constructed through combination of the values for ...

arcade machine ''

I, Robot ''I, Robot'' is a fixup (compilation) novel of science fiction short stories or essays by American writer Isaac Asimov. The stories originally appeared in the American magazines ''Super Science Stories'' and ''Astounding Science Fiction'' betw ...

'', the first commercial game featuring filled polygons, included a math processor built around four AMD 2901 chips. *

Pixar Image Computer The Pixar Image Computer is a graphics computer originally developed by the Graphics Group, the computer division of Lucasfilm, which was later renamed Pixar. Aimed at commercial and scientific high-end visualization markets, such as medicine, geo ...

, 4 Channel Processors each with 4 Am2900's * Simulation Excel (Sim-X),

Oslo Oslo ( , , or ; sma, Oslove) is the capital and most populous city of Norway. It constitutes both a county and a municipality. The municipality of Oslo had a population of in 2022, while the city's greater urban area had a population of ...

, Norway: Typographical workstation / typesetter; one of its four processors was a 16-bit microcoded calculation and transformation engine built from four 2901 slices and one 2910 address sequencer. The Sim-X machine used a 16-bit integer multiplier to optimize graphical transformations. The machine debuted in 1983 and the company shut down in 1987. * Eventide H949 Harmonizer; four Am2901 chips (and several microcode PROMs) are used to generate addresses and generate reference voltages for the DAC system audio was not processed in the 2901 ALU section. * Many

Siemens Siemens AG ( ) is a German multinational conglomerate corporation and the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe headquartered in Munich with branch offices abroad. The principal divisions of the corporation are ''Industry'', '' ...

Teleperm and S5 PLCs used for industrial control were built using the 2900 series. * AT&T 3B20D processor. * Metheus / Barco Omega 400 and 500 Series graphics systems; four Am2901 chips (and eight microcode PROMs) were used to perform graphics operations on this 1982 display processor. *

Geac Computer Corporation Geac Computer Corporation, Ltd ( and ) was a producer of enterprise resource planning, performance management, and industry specific software based in Markham, Ontario. It was acquired by Golden Gate Capital's Infor unit in March 2006 for US$1 bil ...

2000, 6000, 8000, and 9000 were all based on 4 x AM2901 chips. The GEAC 9500 was based on the AM29101. The GEAC 2000 was used in pharmacies. The other models were used in library, banking, and insurance automation. The 2000 was a single processor unit. The 6000 and 8000 contained four processors, each dedicated to one of comms, disk, tape, or program processing. The 8000 had local processor memory whereas the 6000 did not. The 9000 and 9500 were AMP systems with up to 8 CPU modules. * AES Data Systems C20 Multiuser Word Processors. AES of Montreal designed a series of modules and systems based on their AES-800 bit-slice processors. 8- 12- and 16-bit buses were part of the design. * Later iterations of the Ferranti Argus 700 e.g. the 700F and 700G, used AM2901 devices, as did as some of the A700 peripheral channel controllers for e.g. hard and floppy disc drives * The High Level Hardware Limited Orion, a user-microcodable minicomputer running Unix. * The 168/E, developed in the late 1970s at the

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford Univers ...

to execute a subset of the IBM 360/370 instructions. * Warrex Centurion, an 8-bit minicomputer built by Warrex (later just Centurion), a Texas based company from the late 1970's to the 1980's. The Am2909 and Am2911 microprogram sequencers and the Am2901 ALU were used in the CPU6 variant. * Amperif Systems Cache Controllers for Sperry+Univac 1100 & 2200 series and IBM 370 series mainframes used the AMD 2900 products to create the microcontroller for these cache subsystems. * The PerkinElmer Computer Systems Division utilized AM2900 devices in the ALU of their 3200 series supermini computers.

Members of the Am2900 family

The Am2900 Family Data Book lists: *Am2901 – 4-bit bit-slice ALU (1975) *Am2902 – Look-Ahead Carry Generator *Am2903 – 4-bit-slice ALU, with

hardware multiply Hardware may refer to: Technology Computing and electronics * Electronic hardware, interconnected electronic components which perform analog or logic operations ** Digital electronics, electronics that operate on digital signals *** Computer hardw ...

*Am2904 – Status and Shift Control Unit *Am2905 – Bus Transceiver *Am2906 – Bus Transceiver with Parity *Am2907 – Bus Transceiver with Parity *Am2908 – Bus Transceiver with Parity *Am2909 – 4-bit-slice address sequencer *Am2910 – 12-bit address sequencer *Am2911 – 4-bit-slice address sequencer *Am2912 – Bus Transceiver *Am2913 – Priority

Interrupt In digital computers, an interrupt (sometimes referred to as a trap) is a request for the processor to ''interrupt'' currently executing code (when permitted), so that the event can be processed in a timely manner. If the request is accepted, ...

Expander *Am2914 – Priority Interrupt Controller *Am2915 – Quad 3-State Bus Transceiver *Am2916 – Quad 3-State Bus Transceiver *Am2917 – Quad 3-State Bus Transceiver *Am2918 –

Instruction Register In computing, the instruction register (IR) or current instruction register (CIR) is the part of a CPU's control unit that holds the instruction currently being executed or decoded. In simple processors, each instruction to be executed is loaded ...

, Quad D Register *Am2919 – Instruction Register, Quad Register *Am2920 – Octal D-Type Flip-Flop *Am2921 – 1-to-8

Decoder Decoder may refer to: Technology * Audio decoder converts digital audio to analog form * Binary decoder, digital circuits such as 1-of-N and seven-segment decoders * Decompress (compression decoder), converts compressed data (e.g., audio/video/im ...

*Am2922 – 8-Input

Multiplexer In electronics, a multiplexer (or mux; spelled sometimes as multiplexor), also known as a data selector, is a device that selects between several analog or digital input signals and forwards the selected input to a single output line. The sel ...

(MUX) *Am2923 – 8-Input MUX *Am2924 – 3-Line to 8-Line

*Am2925 – System Clock Generator and Driver *Am2926 – Schottky 3-State Quad Bus Driver *Am2927/Am2928 – Quad 3-State Bus Transceiver *Am2929 – Schottky 3-State Quad Bus Driver *Am2930 – Main Memory Program Control *Am2932 – Main Memory Program Control *Am2940 – Direct Memory Addressing (DMA) Generator *Am2942 – Programmable Timer/

Counter Counter may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Counter machine, a subclass of register machines * Counter (digital), an electronic device, mechanical device, or computer program for counting * Loop counter, the variable that controls the iter ...

/ DMA Generator *Am2946/Am2947 – Octal 3-State Bidirectional Bus Transceiver *Am2948/Am2949 – Octal 3-State Bidirectional Bus Transceiver *Am2950/Am2951 – 8-bit Bidirectional I/O Ports *Am2954/Am2955 – Octal Registers *Am2956/Am2957 – Octal Latches *Am2958/Am2959 – Octal Buffers/Line Drivers/Line Receivers *Am2960 – Cascadable 16-bit Error Detection and Correction Unit *Am2961/Am2962 – 4-bit Error Correction Multiple Bus Buffers *Am2964 – Dynamic Memory Controller *Am2965/Am2966 – Octal Dynamic Memory Driver Many of these chips also have

7400 series The 7400 series of integrated circuits (ICs) are a popular logic family of transistor–transistor logic (TTL) logic chips. In 1964, Texas Instruments introduced the SN5400 series of logic chips, in a ceramic semiconductor package. A low-co ...

numbers such as the 74F2960 / Am2960.

References

External links

Introduction to Designing with the Am2900 Family of Microprogramable Bipolar Devices Vol 1
Bitsavers' PDF document archive
Introduction to Designing with the Am2900 Family of Microprogramable Bipolar Devices Vol 2
Bitsavers' PDF document archive *
CPU-World
photos of 2900 Family ICs

an introduction to the Am2900 family

* ttp://bitsavers.org/components/amd/bitslice/Mick_Bit-Slice_Microprocessor_Design_1980.pdf "Bit-Slice Microprocessor Design" by John Mick and Jim Brick, Bitsavers' PDF document archive {{AMD processors

Am2900 Am2900 is a family of integrated circuits (ICs) created in 1975 by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). They were constructed with bipolar devices, in a bit-slice topology, and were designed to be used as modular components each representing a different ...

Bit-slice chips

Computers made with Am2900-family chips

Members of the Am2900 family

See also

References

External links