{"id":179059,"date":"2023-12-24T22:22:31","date_gmt":"2023-12-25T04:22:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/transparent-processor-found-in-vintage-hp-computer-exotic-silicon-on-sapphire-chip-discovered-on-a-humble-floppy-drive-pcb"},"modified":"2023-12-24T22:22:31","modified_gmt":"2023-12-25T04:22:31","slug":"transparent-processor-found-in-vintage-hp-computer-exotic-silicon-on-sapphire-chip-discovered-on-a-humble-floppy-drive-pcb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/transparent-processor-found-in-vintage-hp-computer-exotic-silicon-on-sapphire-chip-discovered-on-a-humble-floppy-drive-pcb","title":{"rendered":"Transparent processor found in vintage HP computer \u2014 exotic silicon-on-sapphire chip discovered on a humble floppy drive PCB"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Shirriff\u2019s blog goes into a deep dive with a look inside the HP PHI chip, its construction, and die. He even examines its logic gates, first-in-first-out buffers (FIFOs), and address decoder. Please check out the blog for all these finer details and more.<\/p>\n

In conclusion, the computer historian echoes our initial thoughts that this silicon-on-sapphire IC is \u201cinteresting as an example of a \u2018technology of the future\u2019 that didn\u2019t quite pan out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shirriff also contrasts late 70s era processors<\/a> built on silicon-on-sapphire vs regular silicon in terms of energy consumption and clock speeds. Would you be surprised to hear that silicon-on-sapphire ICs were far superior using these metrics? Things might have panned out differently if these transparent ICs had been mass-produced at better yields<\/a> and lower manufacturing costs. A frightening statistic highlighted by Shirriff is that HP\u2019s silicon-on-sapphire yields were a mere 9%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shirriff\u2019s blog goes into a deep dive with a look inside the HP PHI chip, its construction, and die. He even examines its logic gates, first-in-first-out buffers (FIFOs), and address decoder. Please check out the blog for all these finer details and more. In conclusion, the computer historian echoes our initial thoughts that this silicon-on-sapphire [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-179059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-futurism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}