Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU🔒 SSL Verified

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"Back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s Sandia National Laboratory (in Albuquerque NM USA) began building the capacity to design, fab, and test IC’s at scale (packaging was handled by Fairchild and Allied Signal).   Why would a National Laboratory need the capacity to do this? To provide components that were not available commercially.  In this case, Sandia’s goal was to make radiation hardened devices for use in weapons and space missions.  The harshest environments and where reliability was paramount."

"Sandia began their fab in 1978 on 2″ wafers on a 10u process, a few generations behind ‘state of the art’.  By 1982 this was upgraded to a 4″ wafer system with features as small as 2u.  This was the design node that Sandia used to make all the IC’s used in the Galileo space probe (for its mission to Jupiter). This included the 1802 processor from RCA.  Sandia received the logic diagrams of the processor and its support chips and recreated them in a radiation hardened process.  How many IC’s were needed? Over 50,000 for the probe itself, backups, testing chips etc."

"Sandia also produced various IC’s for weapons’ systems, and not things like tanks or planes or ships, but weapons that need IC’s that can handle intense radiation,  these were generally nuclear warheads, reentry vehicles, ICBMs and things along those lines.  Sandia made the chips for them, as well as maintains a ‘war reserve’ stock of replacement ICs for when they are needed."

"In 1982 Sandia began work on a CMOS rad-hard conversion of the Intel 8085 processor.  This would become the Sandia SA3000. Converting the HMOS Intel 8085 to a rad hard CMOS process took some doing.  The original 8085 had around 6500 transistors.  Converting it to CMOS resulted in a 18,000 transistor device. One of the trickier conversions was the instruction decoder (a large PLA), easy in NMOS, less so in CMOS. The SA3000 was made on 4″ wafers on a 3u process."

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