Artifact Details

Title

Uchiyama, Kunio oral history

Catalog Number

102738176

Type

Moving image

Description

Uchiyama-san attended The Tokyo Institute of Technology starting in 1972, where he eventually earned a PhD in Information Science. He joined Hitachi in 1978 and spent his first two years developing CAD software.

Dr. Uchiyama then moved to a new group whose goal was to put in IBM compatible computer on a very few LSI chips. He first had to teach himself basic computer architecture, but after completing the logic design, the project was stopped. The learning turned out to be valuable as he then worked on the team developing Hitachi’s first 32-bit processor.

After completing that project, he spent a year at Carnegie Mellon University where he worked on a systolic array chip used in image recognition. After returning from Japan, Dr. Uchiyama worked on the TRON project, which was a multi-company Japanese project to build a family of processors and an operating system to compete with the US. Although many of these programs were completed, the products did not sell well.

Subsequently, the rise of digital entertainment systems led to the need for low power, high performance processors. In response, Hitachi developed the Super-H series of processors which were quite successful. Uchiyama worked in this program as well as follow on DSP products.

Today, Uchiyama remains part of the Central Research Lab continuing to work in processor related programs.

Date

2016-06-22

Participants

Fairbairn, Doug, interviewer

Uchiyama, Kunio, interviewee

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Tokyo, Japan

Format

MOV

Subject

Hitachi; Tron; Super-H; systolic arrays

Collection Title

CHM oral history collection

Credit