Masatoshi Shima
Encyclopedia
is a Japanese electronics engineer, who was one of the designers of the world's first microprocessor
Microprocessor
A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...

, the Intel 4004
Intel 4004
The Intel 4004 was a 4-bit central processing unit released by Intel Corporation in 1971. It was the first complete CPU on one chip, and also the first commercially available microprocessor...

, along with Federico Faggin
Federico Faggin
Federico Faggin , who received in 2010 the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by Barack Obama, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on scientists, engineers, and inventors, at the White House in Washington, is an Italian-born and naturalized U.S...

, Ted Hoff
Marcian Hoff
Marcian Edward "Ted" Hoff, Jr. , is one of the inventors of the microprocessor. Hoff joined Intel in 1967 as employee number 12, and is credited with coming up with the idea of using a "universal processor" rather than a variety of custom-designed circuits. His insight started the microprocessor...

, and Stanley Mazor
Stanley Mazor
Stanley Mazor is an American engineer who was born on 22 October 1941 in Chicago, Illinois. He was one of the designers of the world's first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, together with Ted Hoff, Masatoshi Shima, and Federico Faggin.-Early years:...

.

He studied organic chemistry
Organic chemistry
Organic chemistry is a subdiscipline within chemistry involving the scientific study of the structure, properties, composition, reactions, and preparation of carbon-based compounds, hydrocarbons, and their derivatives...

 at Tohoku University
Tohoku University
, abbreviated to , located in the city of Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture in the Tōhoku Region, Japan, is a Japanese national university. It is the third oldest Imperial University in Japan and is a member of the National Seven Universities...

 in Sendai
Sendai, Miyagi
is the capital city of Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, and the largest city in the Tōhoku Region. In 2005, the city had a population of one million, and was one of Japan's 19 designated cities...

, Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

. With poor prospects for employment in the field of chemistry, he went to work for Busicom
Busicom
Busicom was a Japanese company that owned the rights to the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, which they created in partnership with Intel in 1970....

, a business calculator manufacturer. There, he learned about software and digital circuit design. When Busicom decided to use LSI
LSI
LSI may mean* Lord Steel Industry, a manufacturer of stainless steel tubing and piping* Labour and Socialist International, a former socialist international* Lake Superior and Ishpeming Railroad, a railroad service in Michigan, U.S....

 circuits in their calculator products, they approached the American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 companies Mostek
Mostek
Mostek was an integrated circuit manufacturer, founded in 1969 by ex-employees of Texas Instruments. Initially their products were manufactured in Worcester, Massachusetts, however by 1974 most of its manufacturing was done in the Carrollton, Texas facility on Crosby Road...

 and Intel for manufacturing help.
The job was given to Intel, who back then was more of a memory company and had facilities to manufacture the high density silicon gate MOS chip Busicom required.
Following Marcian "Ted" Hoff's
Marcian Hoff
Marcian Edward "Ted" Hoff, Jr. , is one of the inventors of the microprocessor. Hoff joined Intel in 1967 as employee number 12, and is credited with coming up with the idea of using a "universal processor" rather than a variety of custom-designed circuits. His insight started the microprocessor...

 initial conception, Shima designed the 4004 processor at the Intel offices with Hoff and Federico Faggin
Federico Faggin
Federico Faggin , who received in 2010 the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by Barack Obama, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on scientists, engineers, and inventors, at the White House in Washington, is an Italian-born and naturalized U.S...

. His company then sold the rights to use the 4004 to Intel, with the exception of use in business calculators.

Intel then designed the 8008
Intel 8008
The Intel 8008 was an early byte-oriented microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel and introduced in April 1972. It was an 8-bit CPU with an external 14-bit address bus that could address 16KB of memory...

 on their own, but the chip was a commercial failure due to various reasons. Shima was then employed to implement the transistor-level logic of Intel's next microprocessor, which became the Intel 8080
Intel 8080
The Intel 8080 was the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel and was released in April 1974. It was an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibility...

 (he was not involved in creation of 8088
Intel 8088
The Intel 8088 microprocessor was a variant of the Intel 8086 and was introduced on July 1, 1979. It had an 8-bit external data bus instead of the 16-bit bus of the 8086. The 16-bit registers and the one megabyte address range were unchanged, however...

 and 8086
Intel 8086
The 8086 is a 16-bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel between early 1976 and mid-1978, when it was released. The 8086 gave rise to the x86 architecture of Intel's future processors...

). Shima moved to Zilog
Zilog
Zilog, Inc., previously known as ZiLOG , is a manufacturer of 8-bit and 24-bit microcontrollers, and is most famous for its Intel 8080-compatible Z80 series.-History:...

 in 1975 and, using only a small number of assistants, developed the transistor-level and physical implementation of the Z80
Zilog Z80
The Zilog Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor designed by Zilog and sold from July 1976 onwards. It was widely used both in desktop and embedded computer designs as well as for military purposes...

, which Faggin had made instruction compatible with Intel 8080. This was followed by the same task for the 16-bit
16-bit
-16-bit architecture:The HP BPC, introduced in 1975, was the world's first 16-bit microprocessor. Prominent 16-bit processors include the PDP-11, Intel 8086, Intel 80286 and the WDC 65C816. The Intel 8088 was program-compatible with the Intel 8086, and was 16-bit in that its registers were 16...

 Z8000
Zilog Z8000
The Z8000 is a 16-bit microprocessor introduced by Zilog in 1979. The architecture was designed by Bernard Peuto while the logic and physical implementation was done by Masatoshi Shima, assisted by a small group of people. The Z8000 was not Z80-compatible, and although it saw steady use well into...

.

According to co-workers from Intel, Faggin's method that Shima used was to design all logic at the transistor level directly and manually (not at the gate and/or register level). The schematics were therefore hard to read, but as transistors were drawn in such a way that they suggested a "floorplan" of the chip, it actually helped when making the physical chip layout. However, according to Shima himself, the logic was first tested on breadboards using TTL chips, before being manually translated into MOS transistor equivalents.

Prizes

  • 1997 Kyoto Prize
    Kyoto Prize
    The has been awarded annually since 1985 by the Inamori Foundation, founded by Kazuo Inamori. The prize is a Japanese award similar in intent to the Nobel Prize, as it recognizes outstanding works in the fields of philosophy, arts, science and technology...

     (Advanced Technology)
  • 2009 Fellow of the Computer History Museum
    Computer History Museum
    The Computer History Museum is a museum established in 1996 in Mountain View, California, USA. The Museum is dedicated to preserving and presenting the stories and artifacts of the information age, and exploring the computing revolution and its impact on our lives.-History:The museum's origins...


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK