So I bought some chips on eBay, they arrived, and are New Old Stock, made in 2004, really fairly recent.  I have a datasheet for them that is marked Winbond which I found rather strange, since the chips, as you can see are marked National. This in itself isn’t super unusual. Occasionally a smaller company will use a larger companies markings to get design wins. The larger company acts in essance like a co-signer, validating and approving of the design.

National PC97551

Winbond isn’t small though, and the datasheet was marked 2006.  A quick look on Winbond’s site shows no info on this chip. Turns out Winbond spun off their controller business to a company called Nuvoton. And  how did Winbond get the desgin? Yup, National sold off their Super I/O and embedded controller division to Winbond in 2005.

And it is of course a processor, in this case a 16bit RISC processor running at 20MHz based on the (formerly) National CompactRISC architecture.

Back in the day of CPU’s National was on the forefront of CPU design, while Intel was messing around with 4 and 8 bit designs.  It by itself was the 4th CPU, and the 1st bit slice device. 

It consists of:
4 x 4 bit IMP-00A/520D – These are the Register and Arithmetic Units
1 x IMP16A-521D – Standard 16 bit Instruction set control chip (Based on the Data General Nova)
1 x IMP16A-522D – Extended 16 bit Instruction set (not sure what addition instructions it has)
These were sold in a set by National, and in a pretty nice box.

National IMP16A-500D

Later on National implemented them as a single chip, the IMP16A-500D PACE, and then the NMOS INS8900.
More infomation about the IMP16 can be found at Antique Tech

Marvell, well known for its networking chips, also makes many storage controller solutions and other SoC’s. Marvell currently has two ARM cored lines, the Xscale series (purchased from Intel a year ago) and the Feroceon, a customized ARM core developed by Marvell (they actually have a complete ARM architecture liscense which gives them the ability to design ARM cores beyond the premade IP blocks)

This 88F5182 is a 400MHz processor that I found in a Lacie NAS drive.  It has 64K of L1 cache and supports 200MHz DDR2 RAM (64MB of which was included in this Lacie drive)

Marvell 88F5182-A2-C400

Really a pretty impressive device for a networked storage device.

LSI developped their Fuision-MPT line of SCSI controller (U320 and fibre channel) back in 2001.  Well before ‘dual core cpus’ hit mainstream.  Continuing from the last post, and found on the same PowerEdge motherboard is an LSI53C1030 Fusion-MPT SCSI controller.  This one was made in 2004, and has not one, nor two, but THREE ARM966E-S 32bit cores on it.

Fusion-MPT ARM9 Tri-core by LSI

No idea of the clock speed of the cores, but at 0.18u the cores are good for 200MHz and 250MHz at 0.13u.  The chips system clock is sourced by an 80MHz

In 2002 Intel released a new dedicated I/O processor called the 80303, part of the IOP3xx series.  It was meant to replace the i960RN series for use in RAID controllers etc, and runs at 100MHz.  As far as I can tell the 80303 is an enhancement of the i960 procecessor, it was quickly replaced by a XScale series device (IOP8034X)  This particular one was found on the main board of a Dell PowerEdge 2600 dual Xeon server.
Update: I found a datasheet for this, its core is an i960JT running at 100MHz 

Intel IOP303 Processor.

Today I found my bosses old Dell All-In-One printer, kicked to the curb for operation that cannot be considered flawless. Yanked it apart wand what did we find? Alas a chip by Oasis (no sorry not the band) but Oasis Semiconductor, ironically with their URL marked on the chip:

OA-982 DigiColor2

Oasis? Never heard of them, so I did some research. Oasis was on the forefront of supplying IC’s for the then (late 1990’s) emerging market of All-in-One printers.  The DigiColor2 has an ARM core, and a MCS-51 MCU at its heart, integrating nearly all of the functions to run a printer, scanner, copier and fax.

This turned out to be a great business, so much so that SigmaTel decided to buy them out for $57 million in 2005.  SigmaTel of course famouse for being the main IC supplier for Apple iPods for many years (until the latest generation)  SigmaTel itself has now been bought out by Freescale.

Today I got a not so old (2006) Infocus IN24 projector.  It had bit the dust due to corrosion  from the warm salty air in Maui.

What did I find inside? besides some amazingly cool optics, and power components, there was a large TI DLP Processor, specifically the DDP2000, a rather large BGA chip, that integrates most of the projectors functions as well as a DSP core, and a ARM 946 CPU core. running at 120MHz, good enough for 800×600 resolution.

Processor is the one marked DLP, bare die is a SRAM, far right is the DLP mirror, imaging chip (just layed on the board for your viewing)

Ti DLP ARM CPU and Sensor

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