April 21st, 2011 ~ by admin

Inside the 1802: a Visual6502.org View


RCA 1802E Die - 20x magnification - Visual6502.org

The talent at Visual6502.org continues.  After imaging and building a complete simulator for the MOS 6502 they did the same for the Motorola 6800 (from which the 6502 was based).

We have sent Visual6502.org several chips and they have now imaged the RCA 1802 that we sent.  What is very interesting is how little marking are on the die, the only that I could see was the number ‘10824.’  This particular chip was dated early 1981 though the 1802 COSMAC was designed in 1976 and was one of the first CMOS microprocessors.  The 1802 had around 5000 transistors (Visual6502 will let us know exactly how many once they are done, and of course what each and every one of them does). For higher res shots and more info see here