HP-12C Gold 2007: Affectionate treatment didn't prevent failure

[brouhaha]

Agilent spun off portions of their semiconductor business to Marvell in that time frame. This was most widely reported as being the HP printer chips, but included the 12C chip as well. Since that didn't actually require any technical changes, I suspect that the change from 2AF1-0001 to 2AF1-0002 may have reflected some actual technical change that happened to occur around the same time, rather than just the name of the fab changing from Agilent to Marvell.

Marvell later decided to shut down the fab line making the 2AF1, because the process by that time was very old.. They offered to redesign it in a newer process, but wanted to charge HP over $1.0e6, which is why HP redesigned it with a commercially available ARM microcontroller.