The Hewlett-Packard FOCUS microprocessor, launched in 1982, was the first commercial, single chip, fully 32-bit CPU available on the market. A microprocessor incorporates most or all of the functions of a Central processing unit (CPU on a single Integrated The range of Integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4294967295 or −2147483648 through 2147483647 using Two's complement encoding At this time, all 32-bit competitors (DEC, IBM, Prime Computer, etc. International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology Prime Computer was a Natick Massachusetts -based producer of Minicomputers from 1972 until 1992 ) used multi-chip bit-slice-CPU designs. Bit slicing is a technique for constructing a processor from modules of smaller bit width The FOCUS architecture (Focus CPU, Focus I/O processor (IOP), Focus memory controller (MMU), 16Kx8 dynamic RAM, and a timer) was used in the Hewlett-Packard HP 9000 Series 500 workstations and servers (originally launched as the HP 9020 and also, unofficially, called HP 9000 Series 600). HP 9000 is the name for a line of Workstation and server Computer systems produced by the Hewlett-Packard (HP company It was a stack architecture, with over 220 instructions (some 32 bits wide, some 16 bits wide), a segmented memory model, and no general purpose programmer-visible registers. In Computer science, a call stack is a dynamic stack data structure which stores information about the active Subroutines of a Computer program In Computer architecture, a processor register is a small amount of storage available on the CPU whose contents can be accessed more quickly than storage The design of the FOCUS CPU was richly inspired by the custom silicon on sapphire (SOS) chip design, HP used in their 16-bit HP 3000 series machines. Silicon on sapphire (SOS is a hetero-epitaxial process for Integrated circuit manufacturing that consists of a thin layer (typically thinner than 0 The HP 3000 series is a family of Minicomputers released by Hewlett-Packard in 1973 after a difficult development project
Because of the high density of HP's NMOS-III IC process, heat dissipation was a problem. Therefore the chips were mounted on special printed-circuit boards, with a ~1 mm copper sheet at its core, called "finstrates".
References
- OpenPA: HP9000/520. Paul Weissmann. Retrieved on February 25, 2005.
- HP Computer Museum: Technical Desktops: Series 500. See Product Documentation. for HP Journal articles.
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