TDC1007 - the first monolithic video ADC

[ppppenguin]

Converting video to digital used to be a very complex and critical board full of components. Then TRW introduced the TDC1007. 20MHz sampling, 8 bit resolution. It was in a monstrous 64 pin ceramic DIL package and cost several hundred $$$. But it did the job in 1 chip and was ued by Quantel and many others in pioneering digital video processing systems. It even won an Emmy award, such was its importance.

Knowing TRW's background in military and aerospace I wouldn't be surprised if it was first developed for military radar. The TV usage might well have been secondary.

https://datasheetspdf.com/pdf-file/54502.../TDC1007/1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRW_Inc.#S..._computers
https://www.edn.com/remembrance-of-chips-past/

I happen to have acquired a few, brand new old stock in original manufacturer's packaging. Perhaps I should try to sell them to these guys: https://www.godiac.com/products/tdc1007j1c1 to raise some funds for the BECG: www.becg.org.uk
They'd probably give me £1 each knowing the ways of the world.

There's even one on ebay for nearly $3000!  https://www.ebay.com/itm/IC-MICROCIRCUIT...0029069475

Or a used one here for just £10: https://www.ebid.net/us/for-sale/ic-micr...426454.htm

Would anyone like one for a donation to the BECG?

[Nick]

Thanks for taking me down that Google rabbit hole of memories on a sleepless night!

I ended up revisiting bit slice processors, specifically the AMD2900 series which formed the core of my EE thesis. I still have a copy of that, my first big ECL design, complete with a custom 6800 front-end... Later, I ended up as a design engineer for DEC's CSS (Computer Special Systems) division which did a lot of secret squirrel stuff...

On my "shelf of history" in the workshops, I still have an AMD2901, an LSI-11 microcoded chipset (PDP11 on a chip) and a bunch of other odd chips, plus the Sinclair Scientific I bought when at school (plus my British Thornton slide rule)...

Interesting times!

[ppppenguin]

ECL, the fastest logic there was at the time. Wonderful stuff that always worked provided you got the microstrip or stripline characteristics right and used the proper terminations. And could afford the power. By comparison TTL was troublesome, notably the S and F varieties and CMOS was slow. Later fast CMOS like AC and ACT was troublesome. Much of the trouble was casued by inability to do proper impedance matching on loads of tracks. Thank goodness for FPGAs.

[Nick]

ECL, the fastest logic there was at the time. Wonderful stuff that always worked provided you got the microstrip or stripline characteristics right and used the proper terminations. And could afford the power..

True. When at DEC one of the projects I was a designer on involved a lot of ECL in a very high speed graphics display...

We put a rotating red light and a radiation warning sticker on the prototype (the customer saw the funny side, thankfully) - thermal management was a significant part of the design...

[ppppenguin]

When I was at Crossfield as a fairly junior engineer c1984 one of my jobs was to redesign a video graphics generator. The whole system was built on PCBs about 15" square with 3x DIN 96 pin connectors. The PSUs were 200A at +5V for the TTL etc and 160A at -5.2V for the ECL. The processing side was AMD bitslice but my job was the other side of the cage. 1Kx1K 32 bit (RGB + alpha) graphics, very exotic for the time. RAM was made from 8(?) cards full of 64Kx1 DRAM, the video side logic was a mix of TTL and ECL, the pixel clock was 45MHz.

I managed to halve the number of RAM cards by increasing the chip density on the PCB. 256K DRAM were becoming available at the time but didn't offer any advantage as we needed a very wide memory bus to get the data throughput. I also condensed 3 cards full of ECL and TTL into 1. Partly by using newfangled 22V10 PAL devices, partly by better design.

We did thermal management by brute force - massive fan tray at the bottom of the cage.

Can't remember what we used for 8 bit DACs at 45MHz. Probably something by TRW.