> On Aug 7, 2025, at 7:41 PM, Wayne S via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Didn’t Dec buy the MIPS company? So did not develop MIPS internally at all?
No, DEC did not buy MIPS. It bought MIPS chips. And it did develop an very
odd in-house MIPS architecture chip as an R&D exercise, called BIPS, a 1 GHz
MIPS chip as a single ECL VLSI chip. I don't remember if it actually happened;
ECL fabs were disappearing at the time. The CAD machinery for it was
fascinating because it allowed for a full-custom design that would adjust to
different fab rules. And a bunch of interesting work was done for the physical
design, such as a chip package with a heat pipe, and research into the current
carrying capacity of gold bond wires (which is amazingly high). I have a few
of the internal reports still saved away; I've never seen a public document
that discusses it. Some memory says that it needed over 100 watts of power,
which at the time was way beyond what anyone else had done. I'd have to dig to
find when this was done; perhaps 1992 or so, definitely at least a year before
I left DEC in 1994. I made a suggestion for an unusual die attach scheme when
I saw one talk about this, and about a year later saw the report saying what
they had done with the idea. I think it might have worked but then the project
was canceled so the patent was never filed, too bad -- for a software guy to be
named on a die attach patent would have been fun.
paul
