Old IC history from the grognards. Do we have grognards here?

[SavannahLion]

I'm trying to satisfy a long standing curiosity.

Is there any site that records when IC's enter a market for the first time? Even a ballpark year?

For instance, you can get an idea of when an Atmel AVR microcontroller hits the market based on the revision history in their datasheets. Intel x86 chips are so closely monitored by fans that it's extremely easy to dredge  up their introduction dates. Even the venerable 555 is well studied with a history repeated a million times over across the net.

On the other side of the coin if someone takes a look at Phillips Semiconductor datasheets (I'm looking at the one for the 74HC74 as an example), you can see a hint about an earlier date "Product specification Supersedes data of 1998 Feb 23". There's also a hint at an earlier chip since the datasheet mentions that the 74HC74 is pinout compatible with the LSTTL version (would that be 74LS74?). To me, that implies there is a previous iteration for that chip and the possibility of an even earlier iteration as a straight number like 7474 (maybe).

I've seen and heard mention of "great big books" with a comprehensive listing of EVERY chip of a particular family such as the 7400 series, 4000 series and a few others along with their equivalent (such as the equivalent 5400 series). If such books were published every year, then one can infer, at least ballpark, when a said IC appeared on the market as it would appear in the book that year, or at the very least, the following year. My Search-fu turns up crap like the lists at Wikipedia which is the bare minimum or references on ebay-like sites.

[PL1]

Not sure if anyone did annually-revised books, but here are several essential titles:

  TTL Cookbook (1974) by Don Lancaster -- 412 pages

  TTL Logic Data Book (1988) by Texas Instruments -- 1100 pages

By searching on "TTL reference book" or similar terms, you can probably find titles from different years by various authors.


Scott

[RandyT]

The only way I know of is to check the copyright date of the datasheet.  Even through multiple revisions, that date should indicate the original year of publication.  For example, the datasheet for 74HC74 chip from Fairchild is dated "February 2008", but the copyright notice for the same datasheet is "©1983 Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation".

Of course, this will only show the year for that manufacturers version of the chip.  Finding the first manufacturer would entail going through a lot of datasheets.

[ark_ader]

Isn't this documentation stored at the Library of Congress Archive?

[SavannahLion]

The Don Lancaster book is a pretty good read. Apparently the dude is still alive and released a few of his other works as pdfs. Haven't had a chance to hunt down the other book.

The only way I know of is to check the copyright date of the datasheet.  Even through multiple revisions, that date should indicate the original year of publication.  For example, the datasheet for 74HC74 chip from Fairchild is dated "February 2008", but the copyright notice for the same datasheet is "©1983 Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation".

Of course, this will only show the year for that manufacturers version of the chip.  Finding the first manufacturer would entail going through a lot of datasheets.

That's what I've been doing but I noticed that not all the manufacturers go this far. It might be product of where those datasheets come from. Those "printed" more or less directly to pdf seem to have that information. It's hit or miss with the scanned documents. Maybe those are part of a larger set? No idea.  But yeah, I'm not inclined to try and figure out first manufacture.

Isn't this documentation stored at the Library of Congress Archive?

Hard to say. When you search for IC's whose numbers are something like 7446 it make searches very difficult and annoying.

In addition, I don't think the LoCA keeps datasheets of that nature. I've never seen any there anyways. Patent office might be a possibility now that I think about it. Checked one data sheet and it makes no mention of any patent number, doesn't mean another datasheet won't have it either. 

It's not really a big deal. I was trying a vector to see if I can locate PCB's pictures that use some of the monolithic IC's from back when instead of the "modern" layouts you see all over the internet today.