large digital multiplier IC

Question

I was in college 18 years ago and saw a classmate's project that had a very large DIP IC on it (roughly 1"x4" !) which he said was a digital multiplier IC. (I assume it was 32x32 -> 64) I'm curious what part that might have been and was wondering if anyone might be able to help me find it.

[TRW](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRW) used to make parallel mutipliers in DIP ICs, eg the long obsolete 016HJ1C 16 X 16 part. — MikeJ-UK, Apr 02 '12 at 12:56

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 02 '12 at 12:53

A few companies made stand alone digital multipliers. A long time ago I used one from Weitek (might be spelled differently). If I remember there were two other competing products we considered at the time. One was from Honeywell, but I'm not sure that ever made it to the market. I think the third was Analog Devices.

I designed a 3D graphics processor in the mid to early 1980s that used a floating point multiplier and adder. These were both large DIP chips. Both had effectively a 5 stage pipeline if I remember right. I put a very basic sequential controller around them so we could do things like divide, square root, sin, cos, etc by using microcode.

thanks! Looks like the Weitek WTL1232 might have been it: about 0.8" x 3.2" http://datasheets.chipdb.org/Weitek/WTL1232.pdf — Jason S, Apr 02 '12 at 12:57

score 6 · Answer 2 · edited Jan 13 '13 at 18:50

6

TRW made multipliers such as this 16 X 16 part :-

TRW1016

or this, which would be over 3" long!

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edited Jan 13 '13 at 18:50

Dean

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answered Apr 02 '12 at 13:00

MikeJ-UK

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large digital multiplier IC

2 Answers2