SoylentNews

owl [soylentnews.org] writes:

Back in the late 1970s, the most popular memory chip was Mostek's MK4116, holding a whopping (for the time) 16 kilobits. It provided storage for computers such as the Apple II, TRS-80, ZX Spectrum, Commodore PET, IBM PC, and Xerox Alto as well as video games such as Defender and Missile Command. To see how the chip is implemented I opened one up and reverse-engineered it. I expected the circuitry to be similar to other chips of the era, using standard NMOS gates, but it was much more complex than I expected, built from low-power dynamic logic. The MK4116 also used advanced manufacturing processes to fit 16,384 high-density memory cells on the chip.

Original Submission