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"Reverse-engineering the classic MK4116 16-kilobit DRAM chip"

13 Comments -

1 – 13 of 13
Blogger Bill said...

I'm surprised they ran A0-A4 and their complements all the way to the decoders; I had been taught that it was better to predecode A0/A1 and A2/A3 to produce four one-hot signals and reduce the width of the decoder. That reduces both the dynamic power (fewer long lines toggling) and speeds up the decoder by having a narrower gate without increasing the number of wires (4 one-hot instead of 2 complementary). Mind you for dynamic NMOS, wide NOR gates are really cheap so I guess it didn't matter too much.

November 14, 2020 at 12:49 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Excellent post and analysis. A small typo about the Samsung link you provided. It's 16 Gigabit not Gigabyte.

November 14, 2020 at 3:54 PM

Blogger Myst said...

I absolutely love your blog, Ken! I wish my own computer science degree included a course on disassembling old CPUs, in addition to having us design small microcontrollers from scratch. Is there a book/video course on chipset design that you would recommend?

November 14, 2020 at 4:32 PM

Blogger DT said...

Should the last paragraph refer to 16 gigabit and 16 kilobit rather than -byte?

November 14, 2020 at 5:00 PM

Blogger Brian of Romsey said...

Ken, great work (as usual). Note 12 seems incomplete, it ends mid-word and there's no full stop.

November 14, 2020 at 7:06 PM

Blogger Jecel said...

Brian mentioned the incomplete note 13, but the information is given again in note 13 where it says "100 milivolts or so".

November 15, 2020 at 11:53 AM

Blogger Ken Shirriff said...

Myst: For old chips, Mead and Conway gives a good overview of VLSI technology. For modern chips, "CMOS VLSI design" gives a reasonable overview. "Modern Processor Design" explains processor architectures well, superscalar and pipelining. Any readers have other recommendations?

Anonymous, DT, Brian, Jecel: thanks for finding my errors; I have fixed them.

November 15, 2020 at 12:36 PM

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November 16, 2020 at 4:39 AM

Blogger firepower said...

Note 5. Intel only had housing to make 18 pin packages.
this was from the history of 8080 VS Z80
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1dH8UvlEdI

November 16, 2020 at 4:43 AM

Blogger Dogzilla said...

I was hired at Mostek in 1980 as a new grad. I worked on processors, primarily the Z80 family, so I didn't work directly with this chip. I had friends that worked on the MK4116, it was a really high volume military grade chip for many years.

Most of us think about DRAM going into personal computers, but at that time the market was mostly mainframe and minicomputers, which had a lot of DRAM chips. Reducing the package size made a huge difference in large computers, not so much in PCs of the day.

Mostek had a training program, I was lucky enough to attend design classes taught by Bob Probstein. He was a very good engineer, also a darn good teacher.

Mostek made the muxed address DRAM an industry standard instead of keeping it proprietary. In those days, more so than today, companies really avoided single sourced components. This is why the MK4116 design changed the industry.



November 18, 2020 at 2:37 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Is there a good reason why DRAM chips have the GND/Vcc connections reversed from what is usually seen with TTL, for example?

Great article as always, thanks.

November 19, 2020 at 12:44 PM

Anonymous Steve said...

A fun walk back in time. Thanks! I was thinking back to a particular project, and wondering if Google might yield me any usable chronology. It didn't, but I did find your blog!

Dogzilla and I likely overlapped, as I joined MOSTEK out of college in June 1979. Started in 1215 Crosby, ended up in the South Bldg. I was assigned to Reliability on the MK4116 Rev G', and yes, Bob Probstein was an engineer's engineer.

I still have my 1979 Memory Databook and might even have an old Dick Foss MOSAID reverse engineering / construction analysis report on the G' and earlier revisions buried somewhere.

February 9, 2022 at 1:41 PM

Anonymous EdG said...

Wow! Another Mostek "grad" here, also overlapping with Steve and Dogzilla! Like Steve, I also started June 1979 in 1215 Crosby, Fab "B" (I think? That was a long time ago...) and I was actually making 4116s. I was one of the supervisors for the photo-lithograph group and remember seeing ALL of the traces on the wafers above.

Thank you for preserving this!

December 27, 2022 at 9:12 AM

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