Artifact Details

Title

IBM Chips - Magnified shot of a 64k RAM chip

Catalog Number

102650350

Type

Still Image

Description

Black and white. It is a mostly blacka and white photograph of connection wires on some sort of board. There is a white arrow in the right of the photograph pointing at some lines. The verso reads "SELF-TIMING: The self-time sense amplifier, indicated by the arrow in this Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) photograph, is one of the msot important circuit innovations in IBM's experimental 64 thousand bit (64k) random access memory (RAM). Made using Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology, this chip achieves an access time of 15 billionths of a second (nanoseconds). Timing, essential for rapid retrieval of information from the chip, is set by a signal from the appropriate word-line (in the array circuitry seen on the photograph's left side). The combination of this direct setting, the use of the distinct slow and fast stages in the sense amplifier, and the use of CMOS technology work together to increase the speed and reliability of the setting, and so of the entire chip."

Publisher

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM)

Identifying Numbers

Other number P4020

Format

Photographic print

Category

Identification photograph; Publicity photograph

Subject

Computer industry--History; Computers--History; Electronic data processing--History

Credit

Courtesy of Gwen Bell

Lot Number

X7413.2015