Hitachi Ltd’s Hitachi Research Laboratory and Device Development Center claim to have developed the world’s first microprocesor in BiCMOS technology. The part, described at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in New York last week, is clocked at a racy 70MHz and follows Hitachi’s development of the world’s first BiCMOS gate arrays in December 1984 and BiCMOS static in May 1985. The uses a 1.0 micron Hi-BiCMOS process and integrates 529,000 transistors on a 13mm square chip, at a density closed to the current 32-bit CMOS microprocessors. The bipolar elements are only 1.5% of the total number of transistors, but the chip is claimed to do 32-bit integer calculations at a peak 70 MIPS. No special cooling is required, but Hitachi gave no indication of the instruction set.
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