[SIGCIS-Members] IEEE Spectrum Chip Hall of Fame new inductees

[Stephen Cass]

Hello all,

The official announcement is July 5th, but I wanted to give you folks a
heads up that we've soft-launched the 2018 class of inductees for *IEEE
Spectrum*'s Chip Hall of Fame, which tries to tell the stories behind the
invention of influential integrated circuits. This years inductees are:

·     The Intel 4004, the world’s first microprocessor on a single chip.
Intended as a quick side-venture to make some money for then-fledging
Intel, this project almost crashed and burned due to a lack of staff.

·     The RCA CDP 1802 processor, which helped pioneer the concept of
having computers in the home for learning and fun. But probably the
greatest achievement of Joe Weisbecker’s visionary CPU was when it was used
as the brains of the NASA Galileo probe that orbited Jupiter.

·     The Photobit PB-100 image sensor. Spun out from an attempt to make
faster, cheaper, and better cameras for NASA’s later space probes, this
sensor first appeared in inexpensive webcams, and its technology became the
basis for the smartphone camera revolution.

·     The Philips TDA7000 radio receiver. This FM radio IC was small enough
to put into a pencil, and showed up in countless gadgets. But getting the
chip into production over corporate resistance required sneaking
illicitly-made demo radios to Japan in order to stoke demand.

·     The Nvidia NV20 graphics processing unit. Nvidia gambled that making
this, the first programmable GPU, would be a desirable boost to developers
looking to feed the demand for ever more realistic video games. The NV20
serendipitously opened the door to today’s machine-learning revolution when
such programmable GPUs turned out to be the perfect hardware for training
deep neural networks.

All can be found here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/static/chip-hall-of-fame
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