Right you are!  My first real job out of college was with Scientific Micro Systems,
which used to be Signetics Memory Systems and they developed the 8X300.  So,
there was a vested interest in using that chip.

Yep it is/was bipolar.  Low power Schottky.  Sucked up a ton of power.  We had
to use fusible link proms to program them with too.  I think we used nibble wide
proms for production.  Seems like we tried to reuse the once programmed proms with
patching so we didn't have to throw away a full set of proms for a patch.

I also remember some of the "system" multi chip modules we used to do. These included
seperate modules on a ceramic header with CPU and I/O modules on them. 

It was a strange critter.

  Cheers,

    Rich S.
 
---- Original Message ----
From:		Alan B. Pearce
Date:		Mon 7/16/07 9:08
To:		Microcontroller discussion list - Public.
Subject:	Re: [PIC]/[EE] Small microcontroller with GCC support?

>Anybody remember the Signetics 8X300?

As I recall it, that was a bipolar bit slice unit with instruction decode 
and register set in it, is that correct?

Sort of fell by the wayside when the AMD2900 4 bit wide unit came out with 
lower power consumption and expandable to 4n bits wide, where n could be 
almost any number of chips. I think the 2900 was also faster (100nS cycle 
for the earliest units IIRC, later ones were faster).

Part of my last job in NZ was repairing processors made from 2900 bit slice 
units. The later 2nd source chips were even faster and lower power. 

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