EEVblog® Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff => Topic started by: ryanmoore on October 02, 2015, 03:55:57 pm
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Anyone know anything about this family?
I picked up a big box of 74-series logic on ebay recently, and among the usual LS/HC/HCT stuff there were a couple of tubes of HCTLS stuff. They're all from the same manufacturer (a logo I don't recognise). It might just be their name for HCT, but there's doesn't seem to be a lot of information about this family out there.
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Here's a datasheet for a 74HCTLS260 by a company called Zytrex:
http://pdf.datasheetarchive.com/datasheetsmain/Datasheets-112/DSAP0046660.pdf (http://pdf.datasheetarchive.com/datasheetsmain/Datasheets-112/DSAP0046660.pdf)
HCTLS looks to be their designation for HCT.
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HCTLS looks to be their designation for HCT.
It's more than just that. According to the datasheet posted, it's a 5V CMOS process, thus very low quiescent current, and very low input currents associated with CMOS devices, but with the high output drive capabilities (and thus high-fanouts) associated with the bipolar LS TTL family.
Seems like a hybrid with standard cmos front end and bipolar output drivers. They called it ICE-MOS. According to my search, they shut down in 1985.
http://www.upi.com/Archives/1985/05/15/Business-Briefs/3013484977600/ (http://www.upi.com/Archives/1985/05/15/Business-Briefs/3013484977600/)
According to this former employee: Rick Longley (https://www.linkedin.com/in/longley)
Recruited into this NASDAQ startup while they were in stealth mode. First silicon came about a month later. The design -for a CMOS ROM- was fundamentally flawed. The process - UltraCMOS - by Frank Wanlass proved to need work for which there was no time; it was time for results. UltraCMOS was to be the 1st CMOS+Bipolar process, but the bipolar features needed more work. I asked Frank what was left if he stripped off the process layers that related to bipolar. Frank responded: "we'd have the most producible CMOS ever" (and 20 yrs prior he got the original patent on CMOS). Thus was born: ICE-MOS. ICE-MOS was later licensed by Samsung.
I wonder if Samsung did anything with it?
EDIT: I think the found the original patent for the marriage of CMOS and bipolar, which later became known as BiCMOS.
http://www.google.com/patents/US4425516 (http://www.google.com/patents/US4425516)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BiCMOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BiCMOS)
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I wonder if Samsung did anything with it?
They did release some 74HCTLS parts, for example:
http://www.datasheet4u.com/PDF/528204/74HCTLS239.html (http://www.datasheet4u.com/PDF/528204/74HCTLS239.html)
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Is it similar to BiCMOS logic?
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Is it similar to BiCMOS logic?
Yes, I think it is, and I made that connection in my post too. However, this ICE-MOS tech was invented and patented in the early 80's, yet BiCMOS came out in the 90's. BiCMOS may be the same but different enough that it doesn't violate the patents. Or maybe not, since the company went bankrupt ...