Intel 4004 from discrete SMD transistors

[William Blair]

About the web page I posted the link for yesterday:

http://www.4004.com/

I emailed the owner of the site to ask a question and got an interesting response:

The right-hand 4004 exhibit photo at the top of the page looks like a 4004 reproduced with surface mount devices on a PC board. Is that what it is?  If so, where is it specifically discussed in the text?

Thanks,
Bill

Hi Bill,

Those are indeed surface-mount transistors positioned where the original transistors are on the chip, but the photo is of a non-functional prototype currently on exhibit at the Intel Museum. Alas, we are still working on our ultimate goal of building a fully functional reproduction of the 4004, and displaying that in a museum or two. There is no write-up because this ambitious part of the saga is still in-progress, and because we're all busy professionals with "day jobs," there is currently no estimated completion date. 

Since you expressed an interest, here's where we're at: we have a verified netlist from the schematics, and an unverified netlist we painstakingly extracted from the mask artwork. It contains key geometry information we need for layout and routing, but also some errors we need to find and fix. We ran into a snag reconciling the two netlists (it is an "NP hard" problem), but I think we're getting close to a solution. Then we can move to the PC board layout stage, build another giant prototype, and start debugging... I'm crossing my fingers and praying that we can finish the project by this upcoming 37th anniversary of the 4004 product announcement back on November 15 of 1971. 

--Tim