Artifact Details

Title

Altera EP300 oral history panel : design and development

Catalog Number

102702147

Type

Document

Description

In this oral history, five of the engineers involved with the founding of Altera and the development of the its first product describe their experiences during that period. They cover the motivations for the company’s formation and the challenges they faced in the development of the first product. With minimal funds and tools, they do most of the design and verification work by hand. With focus and hard work, they were successful and were able to ship the product with only one mask turn. They were also pioneers in the development of IBM PC based programming tools and in the use of an outside foundry for their fabrication needs.

Date

2009-08-20

Contributor

Chan, Yiu-Fai, Panelist
Frankovich, Robert, Panelist
Hartmann, Robert, Panelist
McCarthy, Clive, Panelist
Smith, Stephen, Moderator; Editor
Wong, Don, Panelist

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, California

Extent

25 p.

Category

Transcription

Subject

semiconductor history; Fairchild; Programmable Logic Array (PLA); Monolithic Memories, Inc. (MMI); Programmable Logic; Ricoh; Source III; Signetics; Gate array; Programmable Logic Device (PLD); ECAD; erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM)

Collection Title

Oral history collection

Lot Number

X5498.2010