Mostek Corporation was a semiconductor integrated circuit manufacturer, founded in 1969 by L. J. Sevin, Louay E. Sharif, Richard L. Petritz and other ex-employees of Texas Instruments . At its peak in the late 1970s, Mostek held an 85% market share of the dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) memory chip market worldwide, until being eclipsed by lower-priced Japanese DRAM manufacturers who were accused of dumping memory on the market.
84-669: In 1979, soon after its market peak, Mostek was purchased by United Technologies Corporation for US$ 345M . In 1985, after several years of red ink and declining market share, UTC closed Mostek completely and sold it for US$ 71M to the French electronics firm Thomson-CSF , which later spun it off into STMicroelectronics . Mostek's first contract was from Burroughs , a $ 400 contract for circuit design. Initially Mostek products were manufactured in Worcester, Massachusetts in cooperation with Sprague Electric , however by 1974 most of its manufacturing
168-418: A processor or DMA -enabled device needs to read or write to a memory location, it specifies that memory location on the address bus (the value to be read or written is sent on the data bus). The width of the address bus determines the amount of memory a system can address. For example, a system with a 32-bit address bus can address 2 (4,294,967,296) memory locations. If each memory location holds one byte,
252-517: A French Government electronics company, for a mere $ 71 million. By 1986, all United States chip makers had stopped making DRAMs. Thomson called back only about 20% of the workforce in an attempt to return Mostek to profitability. In 1987 Thomson merged its semiconductor operations, including Mostek, with the Italian SGS-ATES to become STMicroelectronics , based in Geneva, Switzerland . At the time of
336-726: A bidirectional data bus, re-using the same wires for input and output at different times. Some processors use a dedicated wire for each bit of the address bus, data bus, and the control bus. For example, the 64-pin STEbus is composed of 8 physical wires dedicated to the 8-bit data bus, 20 physical wires dedicated to the 20-bit address bus, 21 physical wires dedicated to the control bus, and 15 physical wires dedicated to various power buses. Bus multiplexing requires fewer wires, which reduces costs in many early microprocessors and DRAM chips. One common multiplexing scheme, address multiplexing , has already been mentioned. Another multiplexing scheme re-uses
420-726: A card plugged into the bus, which is why computers have so many slots on the bus. But through the 1980s and 1990s, new systems like SCSI and IDE were introduced to serve this need, leaving most slots in modern systems empty. Today there are likely to be about five different buses in the typical machine, supporting various devices. "Third generation" buses have been emerging into the market since about 2001, including HyperTransport and InfiniBand . They also tend to be very flexible in terms of their physical connections, allowing them to be used both as internal buses, as well as connecting different machines together. This can lead to complex problems when trying to service different requests, so much of
504-507: A collaboration with Bulova for the production of high-end wristwatches based on Mostek designs. Bradley was an employee of that joint venture. Paluck left Mostek to work with Sevin Rosen Funds and Convex Computer . As Mostek's focus was shifted to its DRAM products, the industrial and telecommunications products were ignored and their market share vanished. With this foundation in calculator chips and high volume DRAM production, Mostek gained
588-510: A multiplexed address scheme, the address is sent in two equal parts on alternate bus cycles. This halves the number of address bus signals required to connect to the memory. For example, a 32-bit address bus can be implemented by using 16 lines and sending the first half of the memory address, immediately followed by the second half memory address. Typically two additional pins in the control bus – row-address strobe (RAS) and column-address strobe (CAS) – are used to tell
672-509: A passive backplane connected directly or through buffer amplifiers to the pins of the CPU . Memory and other devices would be added to the bus using the same address and data pins as the CPU itself used, connected in parallel. Communication was controlled by the CPU, which read and wrote data from the devices as if they are blocks of memory, using the same instructions, all timed by a central clock controlling
756-521: A reputation as a leading semiconductor "fabrication house" ( fab ) in the early 1970s. In 1974 Mostek introduced the MK5065 , an 8-bit PMOS microprocessor , with 51 instructions whose execution times range from 3 to 16 μs. Architectural features included multiple nested indirect addressing and three register sets (each consisting of an accumulator, a program counter and a carry/link bit) which could be used for interrupt processing or for subroutines. Bill Mensch
840-506: A serial bus inherently has no timing skew or crosstalk. USB , FireWire , and Serial ATA are examples of this. Multidrop connections do not work well for fast serial buses, so most modern serial buses use daisy-chain or hub designs. The transition from parallel to serial buses was allowed by Moore's law which allowed for the incorporation of SerDes in integrated circuits which are used in computers. Network connections such as Ethernet are not generally regarded as buses, although
924-446: A single source LRI/LRU or, as with ARINC 629, MIL-STD-1553B, and STANAG 3910, be duplex , allow all the connected LRI/LRUs to act, at different times ( half duplex ), as transmitters and receivers of data. The frequency or the speed of a bus is measured in Hz such as MHz and determines how many clock cycles there are per second; there can be one or more data transfers per clock cycle. If there
SECTION 10
#17328452244451008-642: A smoky fire in the wafer fab closed it for several months and production of some critical products was shifted to a friendly fab ( Synertek ) in Silicon Valley. Several employees played a key role in the Telecommunications and Industrial Products Department. Bob Paluck headed the department and later Dave Seeler, assisted by Mike Callahan, Charles Johnson, William Bradley, Robert C. Jones, Bob Banks, Ted Lewis, Darin Kincaid, and William Cummings. Telecom marketing
1092-556: A transition from 12V & +/−5V to 5V-only operation, in order to free the +12V and −5V pins for use as addresses (the +5V and ground pins were assigned to pins 8 and 16, respectively, rather than the 16-pin TTL DIP standard of pin 8 for ground and pin 16 for +5V). While most competitors took a conservative approach by simply shrinking (scaling) their 64Ks, Mostek undertook a major redesign which incorporated forward-looking features (such as controlled pre-charge current) that were not necessary at
1176-433: A unified system bus . In this case, a single mechanical and electrical system can be used to connect together many of the system components, or in some cases, all of them. Later computer programs began to share memory common to several CPUs. Access to this memory bus had to be prioritized, as well. The simple way to prioritize interrupts or bus access was with a daisy chain . In this case signals will naturally flow through
1260-406: Is a communication system that transfers data between components inside a computer , or between computers. This expression covers all related hardware components (wire, optical fiber , etc.) and software , including communication protocols . In most traditional computer architectures , the CPU and main memory tend to be tightly coupled, with the internal bus connecting the two being known as
1344-412: Is a single transfer per clock cycle it is known as Single Data Rate (SDR), and if there are two transfers per clock cycle it is known as Double Data Rate (DDR) although the use of signalling other than SDR is uncommon outside of RAM. An example of this is PCIe which uses SDR. Within each data transfer there can be multiple bits of data. This is described as the width of a bus which is the number of bits
1428-539: Is moving manufacturing to Mexico: "The best way to stay competitive and protect the business for long-term is to move production from our facility in Indianapolis to Monterrey, Mexico. " In December, Carrier agreed to keep the Indianapolis plant open, keeping 700 jobs in Indianapolis. The plant in Huntington, Indiana would still close their doors, leaving 700 employees jobless. In June 2019, United Technologies announced
1512-475: Is provided by the bus—is not the case in many avionic systems , where data connections such as ARINC 429 , ARINC 629 , MIL-STD-1553B (STANAG 3838), and EFABus ( STANAG 3910 ) are commonly referred to as “data buses” or, sometimes, "databuses". Such avionic data buses are usually characterized by having several equipments or Line Replaceable Items/Units (LRI/LRUs) connected to a common, shared media . They may, as with ARINC 429, be simplex , i.e. have
1596-436: Is the case with PCI . While the term " peripheral bus " is sometimes used to refer to all other buses apart from the system bus, the "expansion bus" has also been used to describe a third category of buses separate from the peripheral bus, which includes bus systems like PCI. Early computer buses were parallel electrical wires with multiple hardware connections, but the term is now used for any physical arrangement that provides
1680-678: The China Friendship Foundation for Peace and Development , a united front organization under the control of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries . Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have identified UTC. as the 38th-largest corporate producer of air pollution in the United States as of 2008. UTC released roughly 110,000 pounds (50,000 kg) of toxic chemicals annually into
1764-735: The Elmira-Corning Regional Airport in Big Flats, New York . In March 2008, UTC made a $ 2.63 billion bid to acquire Diebold , a Canton, Ohio based manufacturer of banking and voting machines. Diebold rejected the buyout bid as inadequate. In April 2010, UTC announced that it was investing €15 million ($ 20 million) to set up the United Technologies Research Centre Ireland at University College Cork ’s Tyndall National Institute which will carry out research on energy and security systems. In June 2012, it
SECTION 20
#17328452244451848-469: The IBM PC , although similar physical architecture can be employed, instructions to access peripherals ( in and out ) and memory ( mov and others) have not been made uniform at all, and still generate distinct CPU signals, that could be used to implement a separate I/O bus. These simple bus systems had a serious drawback when used for general-purpose computers. All the equipment on the bus had to talk at
1932-647: The Intel 4004 , which they used in a line of desktop calculators. Mostek's device took longer to develop but was the world's first single chip calculator , the MK6010, used for the Busicom LE-120A which went on the market in 1971 and was the smallest calculator available for some time. Hewlett-Packard also contracted with Mostek for design and production of chips for their HP-35 and HP-45 calculators. Mostek co-founder Robert Proebsting invented DRAM address multiplexing with
2016-876: The S-100 bus were used, but to reduce latency , modern memory buses are designed to connect directly to DRAM chips, and thus are designed by chip standards bodies such as JEDEC . Examples are the various generations of SDRAM , and serial point-to-point buses like SLDRAM and RDRAM . An exception is the Fully Buffered DIMM which, despite being carefully designed to minimize the effect, has been criticized for its higher latency. Buses can be parallel buses , which carry data words in parallel on multiple wires, or serial buses , which carry data in bit-serial form. The addition of extra power and control connections, differential drivers , and data connections in each direction usually means that most serial buses have more conductors than
2100-484: The SATA ports in modern computers support multiple peripherals, allowing multiple hard drives to be connected without an expansion card . In systems that have a similar architecture to multicomputers , but which communicate by buses instead of networks, the system bus is known as a front-side bus . In such systems, the expansion bus may not share any architecture with their host CPUs, instead supporting many different CPUs, as
2184-446: The system bus . In systems that include a cache , CPUs use high-performance system buses that operate at speeds greater than memory to communicate with memory. The internal bus (also known as the internal data bus, memory bus or system bus ) connects internal components of a computer to the mother board. Local buses connect the CPU and memory to the expansion bus , which in turn connects the computer to peripherals. Bus systems such as
2268-399: The 10th anniversary of the company's founding, when a large block of stock options controlled by Sprague Electric became vested. The leadership UTC chose for its semiconductor division did not appreciate the up-front investment required or the long time for ROI. UTC at first invested hundreds of millions to expand Mostek, then hundreds of millions more trying to keep the company going during
2352-534: The 1970s and 1980s was higher-stakes and arguably unfocused. Rather than aviation being the central theme of UTC businesses, high tech (of any type) was the new theme. Some Wall Street watchers questioned the true value of M&A at almost any price, seemingly for its own sake. Mostek was sold in 1985 to the French electronics company Thomson . In 2007, UTC opened the Hawk Works, a Rapid Prototyping and Military Derivatives Completion Center (RPMDCC) located west of
2436-558: The 64K level and delayed entry into the market. Mostek's DRAM legacy is exemplified in the MK4116, MK4164 and MK41256. "By four" DRAM was a simple adaptation of the MK4116/MK4164/MK41256 technology, utilizing a larger package to accommodate the additional data bits and multiplexing the data in/out pins as well; the basic *RAS, *CAS, *WRITE and multiplexed address bus concept was retained intact. Mostek enjoyed many years of mastery of
2520-465: The DRAM whether the address bus is currently sending the first half of the memory address or the second half. Accessing an individual byte frequently requires reading or writing the full bus width (a word ) at once. In these instances the least significant bits of the address bus may not even be implemented - it is instead the responsibility of the controlling device to isolate the individual byte required from
2604-468: The IEEE "Superbus" study group, the open microprocessor initiative (OMI), the open microsystems initiative (OMI), the "Gang of Nine" that developed EISA , etc. Early computer buses were bundles of wire that attached computer memory and peripherals. Anecdotally termed the " digit trunk " in the early Australian CSIRAC computer, they were named after electrical power buses, or busbars . Almost always, there
Mostek - Misplaced Pages Continue
2688-546: The MK4096 4096 X 1 bit DRAM introduced in 1973. Address multiplexing reduced cost and board space by fitting a 4K DRAM into a 16 pin package, while competitors used a bulky and relatively expensive 22 pin package. Competitors derided the Mostek approach as unnecessarily complex, but Proebsting understood the future roadmap for DRAM memories would benefit greatly if only one new pin were needed for every 4X increase in memory size, instead of
2772-920: The Mostek second source agreement that allowed any 80x86 processor to be legally copied, which Intel attempted to stop via lawsuits. Eventually, after losing many legal battles, Intel simply changed the name of the 80586 to the Pentium , thereby ending the agreement. Micron Technology was a very successful spinoff founded by a handful of Mostek employees, including Ward Parkinson, Dennis Wilson, and Doug Pitman. Sevin Rosen Funds co-founded by LJ Sevin funded Compaq Computers , Cyrix, Convex Computers and more. Bob Paluck started Convex Computers in ca 1979. Vin Prothro started Dallas Semiconductor in ca 1984. Mike Callahan started Crystal Semiconductor in ca 1979. Charles Johnson started SRX in ca 1981. United Technologies Corporation United Technologies Corporation ( UTC )
2856-631: The U.S. government. In April 2020, UTC merged with the Raytheon Company to form Raytheon Technologies, later renamed RTX Corporation . In 1974, Harry Jack Gray left Litton Industries to become the CEO of United Aircraft. He pursued a strategy of growth and diversification, changing the parent corporation's name to United Technologies Corporation (UTC) in 1975 to reflect the intent to diversify into numerous high tech fields beyond aerospace. (The change became official on May 1, 1975.) The diversification
2940-638: The US Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration ruled in favor of the complaint, but the ruling was too late to save Mostek. Mostek's 256K DRAM had been delayed by a then-ambitious double-layer metallization design. In 1985, when the price for 64Ks had collapsed and 256K prices were already under $ 10, Mostek's 256K device was still not ready for volume production, and the company suffered heavy losses. Eventually, on 17 October 1985, UTC gave up, closed Mostek completely, and days later sold it to Thomson-CSF ,
3024-533: The address bus pins as the data bus pins, an approach used by conventional PCI and the 8086 . The various "serial buses" can be seen as the ultimate limit of multiplexing, sending each of the address bits and each of the data bits, one at a time, through a single pin (or a single differential pair). Over time, several groups of people worked on various computer bus standards, including the IEEE Bus Architecture Standards Committee (BASC),
3108-469: The addressable memory space is 4 GB. Early processors used a wire for each bit of the address width. For example, a 16-bit address bus had 16 physical wires making up the bus. As the buses became wider and lengthier, this approach became expensive in terms of the number of chip pins and board traces. Beginning with the Mostek 4096 DRAM , address multiplexing implemented with multiplexers became common. In
3192-411: The associated eSATA are one example of a system that would formerly be described as internal, while certain automotive applications use the primarily external IEEE 1394 in a fashion more similar to a system bus. Other examples, like InfiniBand and I²C were designed from the start to be used both internally and externally. An address bus is a bus that is used to specify a physical address . When
3276-457: The atmosphere including manganese , nickel , chromium and related compounds. In the 2016 University of Massachusetts Amherst Toxic 100 Air Polluters Index, UTC was ranked 9th by a toxicity population exposure score. It was also reported they release 60,000 pounds (27,200 kg) of toxins into the air. Bus (computing)#Bus multiplexing In computer architecture , a bus (historically also called data highway or databus )
3360-489: The bits themselves, and allows for an increase in data transfer speed without increasing the frequency of the bus. The effective or real data transfer speed/rate may be lower due to the use of encoding that also allows for error correction such as 128/130b (b for bit) encoding. The data transfer speed is also known as the bandwidth. The simplest system bus has completely separate input data lines, output data lines, and address lines. To reduce cost, most microcomputers have
3444-460: The board of directors (chairperson) position went to Louis Chênevert, then the company's CEO, in January 2010, succeeding George David. For the fiscal year 2017, United Technologies reported earnings of US$ 4.552 billion, with an annual revenue of US$ 59.837 billion, an increase of 4.5% over the previous fiscal cycle. United Technologies shares traded at over $ 114 per share, and its market capitalization
Mostek - Misplaced Pages Continue
3528-493: The bus can transfer per clock cycle and can be synonymous with the number of physical electrical conductors the bus has if each conductor transfers one bit at a time. The data rate in bits per second can be obtained by multiplying the number of bits per clock cycle times the frequency times the number of transfers per clock cycle. Alternatively a bus such as PCIe can use modulation or encoding such as PAM4 which groups 2 bits into symbols which are then transferred instead of
3612-409: The bus had to talk at the same speed. While the CPU was now isolated and could increase speed, CPUs and memory continued to increase in speed much faster than the buses they talked to. The result was that the bus speeds were now much slower than what a modern system needed, and the machines were left starved for data. A particularly common example of this problem was that video cards quickly outran even
3696-511: The bus in physical or logical order, eliminating the need for complex scheduling. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) further reduced cost for mass-produced minicomputers , and mapped peripherals into the memory bus, so that the input and output devices appeared to be memory locations. This was implemented in the Unibus of the PDP-11 around 1969. Early microcomputer bus systems were essentially
3780-615: The bus supplied power, but often use a separate power source. This distinction is exemplified by a telephone system with a connected modem , where the RJ11 connection and associated modulated signalling scheme is not considered a bus, and is analogous to an Ethernet connection. A phone line connection scheme is not considered to be a bus with respect to signals, but the Central Office uses buses with cross-bar switches for connections between phones. However, this distinction—that power
3864-431: The cards to be much more complex. These buses also often addressed speed issues by being "bigger" in terms of the size of the data path, moving from 8-bit parallel buses in the first generation, to 16 or 32-bit in the second, as well as adding software setup (now standardised as Plug-n-play ) to supplant or replace the jumpers. However, these newer systems shared one quality with their earlier cousins, in that everyone on
3948-519: The chips powering the Hammond electronic organ . During the introduction of the Z80 , Zilog needed a production partner while they got their own fabs set up. They first signed a production agreement with Synertek , but the company later demanded they sign a second source deal, allowing Synertek to produce and sell the design on their own. Zilog refused, so the agreement was broken. Zilog then selected Mostek as
4032-520: The complete word transmitted. This is the case, for instance, with the VESA Local Bus which lacks the two least significant bits, limiting this bus to aligned 32-bit transfers. Historically, there were also some examples of computers which were only able to address words -- word machines . The memory bus is the bus which connects the main memory to the memory controller in computer systems . Originally, general-purpose buses like VMEbus and
4116-491: The computer into two "worlds", the CPU and memory on one side, and the various devices on the other. A bus controller accepted data from the CPU side to be moved to the peripherals side, thus shifting the communications protocol burden from the CPU itself. This allowed the CPU and memory side to evolve separately from the device bus, or just "bus". Devices on the bus could talk to each other with no CPU intervention. This led to much better "real world" performance, but also required
4200-548: The data directly in memory, a concept known as direct memory access . Low-performance bus systems have also been developed, such as the Universal Serial Bus (USB). Given technological changes, the classical terms "system", "expansion" and "peripheral" no longer have the same connotations. Other common categorization systems are based on the bus's primary role, connecting devices internally or externally. However, many common modern bus systems can be used for both. SATA and
4284-521: The de facto standard CP/M operating system, such as the Osborne , Kaypro , and TRS-80 models. Mostek sought new microprocessor partners and negotiated deals with Intel to gain second sourcing rights to the Intel 8086 microprocessor family and future x86 designs and with Motorola for rights to the Motorola 68000 and VME . Mostek thus secured rights to every microprocessor family that would be important for
SECTION 50
#17328452244454368-489: The difference is largely conceptual rather than practical. An attribute generally used to characterize a bus is that power is provided by the bus for the connected hardware. This emphasizes the busbar origins of bus architecture as supplying switched or distributed power. This excludes, as buses, schemes such as serial RS-232 , parallel Centronics , IEEE 1284 interfaces and Ethernet, since these devices also needed separate power supplies. Universal Serial Bus devices may use
4452-533: The funds were contributed to Republicans, 35% percent to Democrats; In 2005, the firm was among 53 entities that contributed the maximum of $ 250,000 to the second inauguration of President George W. Bush . In 1981, a contribution from UTC made possible the exhibition "Paris/Magnum: Photographs 1935–1981", featuring photographs of Paris taken by photographers of Magnum Photos , the agency founded in 1947 by Robert Capa , George Rodger , Henri Cartier-Bresson , William Vandivert , and David Seymour . A volume of
4536-632: The input and output of a given bus. IBM introduced these on the IBM 709 in 1958, and they became a common feature of their platforms. Other high-performance vendors like Control Data Corporation implemented similar designs. Generally, the channel controllers would do their best to run all of the bus operations internally, moving data when the CPU was known to be busy elsewhere if possible, and only using interrupts when necessary. This greatly reduced CPU load, and provided better overall system performance. To provide modularity, memory and I/O buses can be combined into
4620-469: The intention to merge with defense contractor Raytheon to form Raytheon Technologies Corporation. The combined company, valued at more than $ 100 billion after planned spinoffs, would be the world's second-largest aerospace-and-defense company by sales behind Boeing. Although UTC was the nominal survivor, the merged company was headquartered at legacy Raytheon's former base in Waltham, Massachusetts . The merger
4704-521: The international market for telecommunications products. Their product line included telephone tone and pulse dialers, touchtone decoders, counters, top-octave generators (used by Hammond , Baldwin , and others), CODECs , watch circuits, and a host of custom products for a variety of customers. The products used the simple aluminium-gate PMOS (& later aluminium-gate CMOS ) process and helped maintain Mostek's cash flow through intense DRAM competition, and other semiconductor market pressures. In 1975
4788-501: The merger the new corporation was named SGS-Thomson but took its current name in May 1998 following Thomson's sale of its shares. Mostek's intellectual property portfolio , which included many foundational patents in DRAM technology, turned out to be highly valuable. STM started a series of lawsuits to collect royalties and between 1987 and 1993 made $ 450 million on these licenses alone. Jerry Rogers founded Cyrix in 1988 to capitalize on
4872-429: The metal-gated MK4096), and in 1977 the MK4116 16K double-poly silicon-gate DRAM. They were designed by Paul Schroeder and Robert Proebsting (Schroeder later left Mostek to co-found Inmos ). The MK4116 achieved greater than 75% worldwide DRAM market share. The MK4027 and MK4116 were reverse-engineered by MOSAID and successfully cloned by many companies, both USA and overseas-based. The 64K generation of DRAMs required
4956-446: The minimum of one used in 1-Wire and UNI/O . As data rates increase, the problems of timing skew , power consumption, electromagnetic interference and crosstalk across parallel buses become more and more difficult to circumvent. One partial solution to this problem has been to double pump the bus. Often, a serial bus can be operated at higher overall data rates than a parallel bus, despite having fewer electrical connections, because
5040-527: The most common memory chips used in computers, and when more than 60 percent of those chips were produced by Japanese companies, semiconductor makers in the United States (including Mostek spin-off Micron) accused Japanese companies of export dumping for the purpose of driving makers in the United States out of the commodity memory chip business. Prices for the 64K product plummeted to as low as 35 cents apiece from $ 3.50 within 18 months, with disastrous financial consequences for U.S. chip makers. On 4 December 1985
5124-401: The newer bus systems like PCI , and computers began to include AGP just to drive the video card. By 2004 AGP was outgrown again by high-end video cards and other peripherals and has been replaced by the new PCI Express bus. An increasing number of external devices started employing their own bus systems as well. When disk drives were first introduced, they would be added to the machine with
SECTION 60
#17328452244455208-568: The next 25 years. The Intel x86 microprocessors would go on to become the brains for the IBM PC , while the Motorola 68000 would become the heart of the Apple Macintosh line. However, as with its telecom business, Mostek chose not to aggressively follow-up its entry into microprocessors—instead increasing its concentration on DRAMs. Mostek was bought by United Technologies (UTC) in 1979 for US$ 345M to prevent an unfriendly takeover from Gould at
5292-543: The only other company capable of building a +5V device (as opposed to +5 and +12). Mostek had developed advanced layout methods which were applied to the Z80, resulting in the device being shrunk by 20%. Mostek was able to sign a second source deal for what it called the MK3880. The Z80 eventually became the most popular microcomputer family, and was used in millions of embedded devices as well as in many home computers and computers using
5376-484: The program attempted to perform those other tasks, it might take too long for the program to check again, resulting in loss of data. Engineers thus arranged for the peripherals to interrupt the CPU. The interrupts had to be prioritized, because the CPU can only execute code for one peripheral at a time, and some devices are more time-critical than others. High-end systems introduced the idea of channel controllers , which were essentially small computers dedicated to handling
5460-529: The same logical function as a parallel electrical busbar . Modern computer buses can use both parallel and bit serial connections, and can be wired in either a multidrop (electrical parallel) or daisy chain topology, or connected by switched hubs. Many modern CPUs also feature a second set of pins similar to those for communicating with memory—but able to operate with different speeds and protocols—to ensure that peripherals do not slow overall system performance. CPUs can also feature smart controllers to place
5544-420: The same speed, as it shared a single clock. Increasing the speed of the CPU becomes harder, because the speed of all the devices must increase as well. When it is not practical or economical to have all devices as fast as the CPU, the CPU must either enter a wait state , or work at a slower clock frequency temporarily, to talk to other devices in the computer. While acceptable in embedded systems , this problem
5628-572: The same title, with text by Irwin Shaw and an introduction by Inge Morath , was also published in 1981. UTC is the sponsor of the exhibition "Aphrodite and the Gods of Love" at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts that opened in fall 2011. The firm and its subsidiaries are major contributors to museums such as the New England Air Museum . In April 2015, UTC signed an education partnership agreement with
5712-518: The speed of the CPU. Still, devices interrupted the CPU by signaling on separate CPU pins. For instance, a disk drive controller would signal the CPU that new data was ready to be read, at which point the CPU would move the data by reading the "memory location" that corresponded to the disk drive. Almost all early microcomputers were built in this fashion, starting with the S-100 bus in the Altair 8800 computer system. In some instances, most notably in
5796-426: The two pins per 4X for the evolutionary approach. Computer manufacturers found address multiplexing to be a compelling feature as they saw that a future 64K DRAM chip would save 8 pins if implemented with address multiplexing and subsequent generations even more. Per pin costs are a major cost driver in integrated circuits, plus the multiplexed approach used less silicon area, which further reduces chip cost. The MK4096
5880-411: The various semiconductor and videogame crashes of the early 1980s. UTC sacrificed Mostek's leadership position in some markets, focusing instead on the highly competitive (and eventually unprofitable) DRAM business. Unfortunately the DRAM marketplace was the beachhead where Japanese firms would make their successful assault on the global semiconductor market. In 1985, when 64K DRAM memory chips were
5964-522: The work on these systems concerns software design, as opposed to the hardware itself. In general, these third generation buses tend to look more like a network than the original concept of a bus, with a higher protocol overhead needed than early systems, while also allowing multiple devices to use the bus at once. Buses such as Wishbone have been developed by the open source hardware movement in an attempt to further remove legal and patent constraints from computer design. The Compute Express Link (CXL)
6048-448: Was a white knight move against hostile takeover designs by Gould . At one point, the military portion of UTC's business, whose sensitivity to "excess profits" and boom/bust demand drove UTC to diversify away from it, actually carried the weight of losses incurred by the commercial M&A side of the business. Although M&A activity was not new to United Aircraft, the M&A activity of
6132-463: Was an American multinational conglomerate headquartered in Farmington, Connecticut . It researched, developed, and manufactured products in numerous areas, including aircraft engines , aerospace systems, HVAC , elevators and escalators , fire and security , building automation, and industrial products, among others. UTC was also a large military contractor, getting about 10% of its revenue from
6216-528: Was completed in April 2020. In March 2020, United Technologies Corporation announced the separations of Carrier Global and Otis Worldwide . In April 2008, Louis Chênevert succeeded George David as the company's chief executive officer (CEO). Chênevert served until 2014, when he was succeeded by Gregory Hayes . The chief financial officer 's (CFO) position was held by Gregory Hayes until 2014, when he succeeded Louis Chênevert as CEO. The chairman of
6300-656: Was discovered that UTC sold military technology to the Chinese. For pleading guilty to violating the Arms Export Control Act and making false statements, United Technologies and its subsidiaries were fined $ 75 million. In February 2013, UTC Power was sold to ClearEdge Power . In October 2014, Toshiba and United Technologies made a deal to expand their joint venture outside Japan . In February 2016, UTC subsidiary Carrier Air Conditioner announced to employees at its Indianapolis and Huntington plants, that Carrier
6384-869: Was done at their headquarters in Carrollton, Texas . The first design to be produced was the MK1001, a simple barrel shifter chip made using an aluminium-gate PMOS process. This was followed by a 1K DRAM , the MK4006, designed by Vern McKinney, that was manufactured in their Carrollton facility. Mostek had been working with Sprague Electric to develop the ion implantation process which provided much better control of doping profiles, especially in lowering enhancement-mode transistor threshold voltage and providing depletion-load transistors. Using ion implantation, Mostek became an early leader in MOS manufacturing technology, while their competition
6468-477: Was handled by John Crago, Randall Hopkins, and Henry Wasik. Lewis and Bradley were designated as key employees after the United Technologies purchase. Bradley designed all of the custom products based on the single-chip-calculator platform, as well as the code for the wristwatch chips produced by Mostek for Bulova and other customers. For a short while, Paluck headed a joint venture called Mostek Hong Kong,
6552-441: Was not tolerated for long in general-purpose, user-expandable computers. Such bus systems are also difficult to configure when constructed from common off-the-shelf equipment. Typically each added expansion card requires many jumpers in order to set memory addresses, I/O addresses, interrupt priorities, and interrupt numbers. "Second generation" bus systems like NuBus addressed some of these problems. They typically separated
6636-402: Was one bus for memory, and one or more separate buses for peripherals. These were accessed by separate instructions, with completely different timings and protocols. One of the first complications was the use of interrupts . Early computer programs performed I/O by waiting in a loop for the peripheral to become ready. This was a waste of time for programs that had other tasks to do. Also, if
6720-449: Was one of the engineers who had actually designed the 5065 at Motorola for Olivetti. A more popular product was the MK3870, which combined the two-chip Fairchild F8 (3850 + 3851) into a single chip, introduced in 1977. William Bradley designed a host of custom products based on the 3870. Fairchild later licensed the 3870 back from Mostek. Mostek also produced ROM chips on demand, as well as
6804-455: Was partially to balance civilian business against any overreliance on military business. UTC became a mergers and acquisitions (M&A)–focused organization, with various forced takeovers of unwilling smaller corporations. The next year (1976), UTC forcibly acquired Otis Elevator . In 1979, Carrier Refrigeration and Mostek were acquired; the Carrier deal was forcible, while the Mostek deal
6888-464: Was produced using an NMOS aluminum-gate process with an added interconnect layer of polysilicon (dubbed the SPIN process). The fear, uncertainty and doubt put up by the competition regarding address multiplexing was dispelled by the actual performance of the MK4096 which proved solid and robust in all types of computer memory designs. In 1976 Mostek introduced the silicon-gate MK4027 (an improved version of
6972-461: Was still mostly using the older bipolar technology. The resulting increased speed and lower cost of the MK4006 memory chip made it the runaway favorite to IBM and other mainframe and minicomputer manufacturers (cf. BUNCH , Digital Equipment Corporation ). In 1970 Busicom , a Japanese adding machine manufacturer, approached Intel and Mostek with a proposal to introduce a new electronic calculator line. Intel responded first, providing them with
7056-499: Was valued at US$ 98.6 billion in October 2018. UTC ranked No. 51 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue. During the 2004 election cycle , UTC was the sixth largest defense industry donor to political campaigns, contributing a total of $ 789,561; 64% went to Republicans. In the 2006 election cycle , UTC was again the sixth largest donor to federal candidates and political parties; 53% of
#444555