Inside Intel's Museum: 10 Must-See Exhibits
The Intel Museum, located at the chipmaker's corporate headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., reveals fascinating facts and insights into the company and its technology, including how processors are actually made, the history of these chips, and what the future holds.
Housed in the first floor lobby of its corporate headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., the Intel Museum is more than just a gallery celebrating one company's history. It is also a place where the evolution of an entire disruptive industry is chronicled.
Nearly every device today contains microprocessors and other semiconductor chips. Intel was one of the pioneers of this technology in the 1960s. And that technology became the underlying building block of every subsequent computer, mobile phone, tablet, and console game. The chips are also now in many more varied devices today, including refrigerators, cars, HVAC systems, and electricity meters, to name a few.
It all started in Silicon Valley with chip makers such as Intel.
From Intel's beginnings as a startup in the 1960s with just about 100 employees in Mountain View, Calif., to its position today as a multibillion dollar company pushing the technology envelope in multiple disciplines from chip design to big data, this company's history parallels the development of the personal computer industry.
[See Intel Developer Forum: Spiders, Flying Sharks, and Drones.]
At the Intel Museum visitors will see some of the first wearables created, some early versions of Intel's memory chips and processors, and learn about why Intel transitioned from manufacturing memory chips to processor chips instead. Museum-goers will also find out how Intel makes chips, what materials are used, and what the manufacturing process is like. They'll also learn about some of the early products that incorporated Intel chips, from calculators to hobbyist personal computers.
The museum itself was founded by longtime Intel employee Jean Jones, who started working for the company in 1968, retired in 1996, and passed away last year on March 18, 2015.
Until you can make it to the museum during your next trip to Silicon Valley, here's a look at some of the rich history and technology that this museum offers. Take the tour and let us know what you think. Are there other tech museums we should know about? Tell us in the comments.
Intel was founded in 1968 by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce in Mountain View. Andy Grove joined shortly thereafter, and the three led the development of a new type of computer memory. This photo featured at the museum shows Intel's 106 employees outside the original facility.
The word Intel stands for Integrated Electronics. Intel was founded to bring semiconductor-based computer memory to market.
Intel began its life as a semiconductor computer memory company. But there was another kind of semiconductor that proved to be a better business for Intel -- the processor.
The Intel 4004 was Intel's first processor, introduced in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and it changed the way electronics were designed. Here's one of the first devices powered by the Intel 4004, the Busicom circuit board, which powered the Busicom calculator -- pictured here.
On display at the museum is one of the early microcomputers, the MITS Altair 8800 (from the company Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) which was designed in 1975 and based on the Intel 8080 processor. It was featured on the cover of Popular Mechanics and the expected to do a few hundred sales of the build--it-yourself kit. But thousands sold in the first month.
Intel was a pioneer in the wearables space, too, delivering the first watch with a liquid crystal display (LCD). The Microma watches came from a watch company that Intel acquired in the 1970s called Microma Universal.
Intel cofounder Gordon Moore said about these watches: "The thought at the time was that the wristwatch could become much more than just a watch. You could add functions to it." As recounted in this NPR story, Moore wore his watch for years afterward as a reminder to stay out the consumer watch business, calling it "my $15 million watch."
The intel Bunny People dancers made their debut during the TV broadcast of the 1997 Super Bowl. "They symbolize the fun, richer color, and richer audio experiences that Intel MMX media enhancement technology brought to PCs," Intel said. Intel reports that the Bunny People dancers became cultural icons, spawning orders for hundreds of thousands of dolls created in their image. The Intel Bunny People represented the employees who manufactured the chips, Intel's highly skilled fab technicians, in the 1990s, before the ever shrinking process technologies necessitated leading-edge chip fabrication manufacturing facilities to rely primarily on labor from robotics.
The wafers used to manufacture computer chips come from a basic ingredient, sand. Silicon is the main ingredient in sand, and the silicon used to make wafers that become computer chips is a highly purified form. Intel Chairman Andy Bryant: "The ingredient we start with is sand. Everything else is value added by people."
Moore's Law comes from a 1965 paper written by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore that noted the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit can be doubled about every year. (He later adjusted this to every two years.) This improvement can be used to reduce the costs of production (because you are using a smaller volume of raw materials) and pass that savings along to the consumer. It can also be used to increase the processing power available in the same amount of physical space.
Chip manufacturers talk about the next generation of "process technology" or the next generation of Moore's Law in nanometers today. When they talk about a certain number of nanometers in chip design, they are referring to the distance between one transistor and another on the chip. Nanometers are very small. In the Intel Museum a display points out that an ant is about 5 millimeters in height, or 5 million nanometers. A nanometer is 100 times thinner than a human hair.
Some experts believe that as the distance between transistors reaches the atomic level (you cannot split an atom), then Moore's Law and its benefits end.
In 2010, Intel announced an R&D effort to use light beams as a potential replacement for electrons to carry data in and around computers. The company developed this research prototype representing the world's first silicon-based optical data connection with integrated lasers as part of the effort. The project was part of Intel's ongoing effort to explore new technologies for the building blocks of computing as Moore's Law begins to run into physical limitations. Intel has many such projects underway.
Intel and its pioneering development of microprocessors spawned many more developments across a range of industries. The company was a huge disruptor and innovator. Its museum is well worth the visit.
Intel and its pioneering development of microprocessors spawned many more developments across a range of industries. The company was a huge disruptor and innovator. Its museum is well worth the visit.
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