HP Nanoprocessor

[mfleming]

I found an interesting blog post on the HP nanoprocessor that was used in a number of HP instruments. Developed in 1974, it was a contemporary of the 6800 and 8080 microprocessors. The article goes into a great deal of detail on the architecture and fabrication process for the part, including the reverse engineering of the design from the fab masks. I'm posting this in the not-quite-but-related group due to the use of the processor in 98xx desktop plug-in modules and its instruction set.

http://www.righto.com/2020/09/inside-hp-...speed.html

The article is posted in Ken Shirriff's blog, which is well worth a visit for the other chip teardown related articles.

Enjoy!
~Mark

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

A few years ago Larry Bower sent me his own copy of the HP internal Nanoprocessor User's Guide which I scanned and it is available at https://www.hp9845.net/9845/downloads/ma...cessor.pdf as well as on hpmuseum.net.

Paul.

[rprosperi]

(09-04-2020 05:31 PM)Paul Berger (Canada) Wrote:  A few years ago Larry Bower sent me his own copy of the HP internal Nanoprocessor User's Guide which I scanned and it is available at https://www.hp9845.net/9845/downloads/ma...cessor.pdf as well as on hpmuseum.net.

Paul.

Very cool to own that Paul, thanks for sharing it with the community!

[pinkman]

These good old times when a processor’s architecture, instructions set and pins layout were easily described in a few dozen pages.
The nano processor had 40 pins, today’s intel core 10e has 1200.