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Author Topic: What nm process used for Agnus/Denise/Paula etc?  (Read 7881 times)

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Re: What nm process used for Agnus/Denise/Paula etc?
« on: December 17, 2011, 07:48:28 AM »
I would guess 2000nm to 1500nm for process... And I doubt any Amiga custom chips has more than 30,000 transistors.

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Re: What nm process used for Agnus/Denise/Paula etc?
« Reply #1 on: December 17, 2011, 01:38:27 PM »
Jut looked up MOS (later CSG) and I think they were stuck on some pretty old technology... My guess is that the Amiga chips are probably even 3000nm (3micron)...

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Re: What nm process used for Agnus/Denise/Paula etc?
« Reply #2 on: December 18, 2011, 01:02:05 PM »
Quote from: Hattig;671814
Wasn't some parts of AGA fabbed by HP? Presumably because CSG couldn't fab what was required.
I think you are right, CSG's fabs just weren't up to the task, Lisa might even have been some standard HP mixed mode ULA (now there's a thought for another thread!;) )...

I also seem to remember Jay Miner expressing surprise in an interview in the early 90s that most of AGA was still fabed on the original process that they used back in the mid 80s...

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Re: What nm process used for Agnus/Denise/Paula etc?
« Reply #3 on: December 18, 2011, 04:16:22 PM »
@fishy_fiz: I think you are confusing AGA with Hombre. AGA was never much more than an ECS upgrade. Hombre was supposed to have a PA-RISC core integrated in the chipset.
« Last Edit: December 18, 2011, 04:20:29 PM by bloodline »
 

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Re: What nm process used for Agnus/Denise/Paula etc?
« Reply #4 on: December 18, 2011, 04:19:45 PM »
Quote from: freqmax;671838
I wonder what nm process the AGA chipset might have used..
I already pointed out that it would be either 3000nm or 1500nm....

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_µm_process

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Re: What nm process used for Agnus/Denise/Paula etc?
« Reply #5 on: December 28, 2011, 01:29:06 AM »
Quote from: biged;673097
We are making progress, but slowly.  We've got many chips, but there are bottlenecks at deprocessing, at photography and at layout capture.  And sometimes real life intrudes.

I stumbled across this thread some weeks ago which talks about photographic techniques, and links to some good z80 images too.

Cheers
Ed
Hi Ed, I assume you are part of the Visual6502 project? Wonderful idea! I hope you can hurry along the decapping guys as we all want to see the Amiga chips in their full glory... actually imagine a visual sim of the entire Amiga!!! ;)

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Re: What nm process used for Agnus/Denise/Paula etc?
« Reply #6 on: December 29, 2011, 08:12:58 AM »
Quote from: biged;673358
Yes, I'm part of the team. It's become a slightly distributed effort for the polygon capture, but deprocessing and photography is especially skilled work and is still one guy.

Putting together a system simulation is an attractive idea - noting that the clock speed may be a million times slower than reality, so video frames could be an overnight wait - but it's most likely that some eight-bit system or other will appear before the Amiga, and neither will be soon, because of the bottlenecks. (Quietust is doing well with the NES, and Greg had an early demo of a partial 2600 - see page 44 of the pdf)

Die photos of the decapped chip is always the first thing to appear though, and you'll see it on the blog as soon as it happens!  We do have a chipset for an Amiga 500, and will get to it, but we've other promises to keep up first.

(Thanks to everyone who has donated chips!)

Cheers
Ed
I, for one, really can't wait to see those Amiga Chips stripped bare!

I think your work is the best way to preserve the effort that went into designing these computing devices. :)