Книга: Introduction to Microprocessors and Microcontrollers

Micros are getting bigger – and faster

As the complexity of microprocessors and other digital integrated circuits has increased, there has been an inevitable increase in the number of transistors that are incorporated in their design.

In the list below, we have used transistors or their equivalent. These classifications are not universally accepted, there are different names and numbers floating around, so a degree of flexibility should be employed when comparing different sources. This is particularly true at the large end where the terminology has not yet ‘firmed up’.

The increase in the number of devices has also had the effect of necessarily decreasing the size of each component. If the same component size were used for the current front runners as was used for the original 4004 microprocessor, they would be about the same size as a page of this book. For reasons that we will look at in a moment, unless we reduced the size of the components, we couldn’t increase the speed of operation and so the current microprocessors would have a maximum clock speed of under 1 MHz.

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