On 01/31/2018 04:26 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: > Then again, DEC Western Research Lab in the mid 1980s did an > interesting project to do a full custom single ECL chip > implementation of a MIPS (or Alpha?) CPU, intended to run at 1 GHz. > The CAD system they built for this was quite interesting, as were > bits of key technology like a heat pipe based chip cooling setup, > possibly the first such device. It wasn't finished (the ECL fab > shops kept going out of business faster than the CAD team could tweak > the design rules in the tools) but some neat stuff came out of it, in > internal reports only unfortunately. Still have a bunch of ECL 10K logic--I've never been very interested in using it for anything.
I think that AES built their own minicomputer using ECL back in the 1970s, but I don't recall ever seeing much about its release. More surprising than the advance of Schottky TTL on ECL was the startling speedup of CMOS. Back in the 70s, 4000-series CMOS was among the slowest logic around. By the mid 1980s, we were building supercomputers using CMOS. --Chuck
