Chip Supply Inc. CS603RMP-200 – 2005 Production Miltemp PowerPC 603r

The original PowerPC 603 was released way back in 1994, made on a 0.5u process and running at 75MHz.  A year later, the greatly improved PowerPC 603e was released, made on the same process, but supporting speeds of up to 200MHz.  It doubled the L1 caches to 16K each (for Instruction and Data) and introduced some Power Down modes useful for mobile and other low power applications.  A die shrink to 0.5u allowed speeds of up to 300MHz.

The 603e was available in both BGA  and cerquad packages, which worked for most applications.  But what if you wanted something a bit different?  What if your application needed something a bit more robust.  This is where packaging and die specialist companies come into play.  Motorola/IBM had no desire to make short runs of oddball packages and/or dies screened for higher end use.  Other companies however, did…

Motorola MPC603ERX100LN – 2000 vintage PowerPC 603e

Chip Supply Inc. was founded back in 1978 in Orlando, FL  just for this purpose.  Chip Supply provided die testing and packaging services for many different companies.  They also provided a service known as ‘die banking’ and just as the name implies, this involves collection and storing wafers and/or dies for future use.  This helped with end-of-life products especially.  As manufacturers slowed, changed, or stopped production of a device, dies for it could be made available through firms like Chip Supply.

In 1997 Chip Supply Inc. signed an agreement with Motorola giving them access to bare dies and known good dies for the PowerPC 603e, MPC106/7 PCI Bridge, and the MC68000 line.  This allowed Chip Supply to source dies from Motorola, screen them for higher spec (Military and Industrial temp typically).  Motorola had a similar agreement with Thomson-CSF (later this line was acquired by Atmel) who did the same thing, but also made radiation tested parts for space use (notably used on the original Iridium satellite constellation).

16×16 PGA in a 50mm package. Pins are 6mm long (twice as long as a Socket 7 Pentium)

The CS603RMP-200 is a 200MHz PowerPC 603r processor.  The 603r is nearly identical to the 603e, but allows for lower voltages (2.5V) and is made on a 0.29u process.  Chip Supply packaged this in a 16×16 CPGA package that is 50mmx50mm (nearly 2 inches square). It includes a large, gold plated heatspreader thats about the same size as a typical BGA PowerPC 603e.  These use original Motorola dies, upcreened to Military temperature (-55-125C) and tested to run at 200MHz.  The large heatspreader and ceramic package allow for better thermal management, and better mechanical support.  Thermal cycling and vibrations often result in BGA connection failures (a familiar problem on some game consoles in the early 2000’s), something a properly mounted PGA chip is much more tolerant of.

Chip Supply Inc. was acquired by Micross Components in 2010, a company that formed in 1998, and provided the same services with the addition of radiation testing. It appears that this was the end of the line for the entire PowerPC line by Chip Supply, though its likely that custom orders could be fulfilled for sometime after the acquisition.   Someday perhaps we’ll find out what applications the PGA PowerPC 603s were used in.

UTMC UT69R000-12WCC 12MHz 16-bit RISC -1992

We have previously covered several MIL-STD-1750A compatible processors as well as the history and design of them.  As a reminder the 1750A standard is an Instruction Set Architecture, specifying exactly what instructions the processor must support, and how it should process interrupts etc.  It is agnostic, meaning it doesn’t care. how that ISA is implemented, a designers can implement the design in CMOS, NMOS, Bipolar, or anything else needed to meet the physical needs, as long as it can process 1750A instructions.

Today we are going to look at the result of that by looking at a processor that ISN’T a 1750A design.  That processor is a 16-bit RISC processor originally made by UTMC (United Technologies Microelectronics Center).  UTMC was based in Colorado Springs, CO, and originally was formed to bring a semiconductor arm to United Technology, including their acquisition of Mostek, which later was sold to Thomson of France. After selling Mostek, UTMC focussed on the military/high reliability marked, making many ASICs and radhard parts including MIL-STD-1553 bus products and 1750A processors.  The UT69R000 was designed in the late 1980’s for use in military and space applications and is a fairly classic RISC design with 20 16-bit registers, a 32-bit Accumulator, a 64K data space and a 1M address space.  Internally it is built around a 32-bit ALU and can process instructions in 2 clock cycles, resulting in 8MIPS at 16MHz.  The 69R000 is built on a 1.5u twin-well CMOS process that is designed to be radiation hardened (this isn’t your normal PC processor afterall).  In 1998 UTMC sold its microelectronics division to Aeroflex, and today, it is part of the English company Cobham.

UTMC UT1750AR – 1990 RISC based 1750A Emulation

UTMC also made a 1750A processor, known as the UT1750AR, and if you might wonder why the ‘R’ is added at the end.  The ‘R’ denotes that this 1750A has a RISC mode available.  If the M1750 pin is tied high, the processor works as a 1750A processor, tied low, it runs in 16-bit RISC mode.  How is this possible? Because the UT1750AR is a UT69R000 processor internally.  Its the same die inside the package, and the pinout is almost the same (internally it may be but that’s hard to tell).  In order for the UT1750AR to work as a 1750A it needs an 8Kx16 external ROM.  This ROM (supplied by UTMC) includes translations from 1750A instructions to RISC macro-ops, not unlike how modern day processors handle x86.  The processor receives a 1750A instruction, passes it to the ROM for translation, and then processes the result in its native RISC instructions.   There is of course a performance penalty, processing code this way results in 1750A code execution rates of 0.8MIPS at 16MHz, a 90% performance hit over the native RISC.  For comparison sake, the Fairchild F9450 processor, also a 1750A compatible CPU, executes around 1.5MIPS at 20MHz (clock for clock, about 30% faster), and thats in a power hungry Bipolar process, so the RISC translation isn’t terrible for most uses.

NASA Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere – Camera powered by RISC

By today’s standards, even of space based processors, the UT69R000 is a bit underpowered, but it still has found wide use in space applications.  Not as a main processor, but as a support processor, usually supporting equipment that needs to be always on, and always ready.  One of the more famous mission the UT69R000 served on was powering the twin uplink computers for the DAWN asteroid mission (which only this year ended).  It was also used on various instrumentation on the now retired Space Shuttles. The CPU also powered the camera system on the (also retired) Earth Observing-1 Satellite, taking stellar pictures of our planet for 16 years from 2000-2017.  Another user is the NASA AIM satellite that explores clouds at the edge of space, originally designed to last a couple years, its mission which started in 2007 is still going.  The

JAXA/ESA Hinode SOLAR-B Observatory

cameras providing the pretty pictures are powered by the UT69R000.  A JAXA/ESA mission known as SOLAR-B/Hinode is also still flying and running a Sun observing telescope powered by the little RISC processor.

There are many many more missions and uses of the UT69R000, finding them all is a bit tricky, as rarely does a processor like this get any of the press, its almost always the Command/Data Processor, these days things like the BAE RAD750, and LEON SPARC processors, but for many things in space, and on Earth, 16-bits its all the RISC you need.