Gore to get model microchip

A small microchip model of the original ENIAC computer will be among the souvenirs Vice President Al Gore will take with him from today's visit to the University. The chip, which is a test for the soon-to-be-released full model, represents nine months of work by Engineering junior Lin Ping Ang and Engineering graduate students Titi Alailima and James Tau. According to Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Chairperson Jan Van der Spiegel, who oversaw the project along with Engineering Professor Fred Ketterer, "the goal was to recreate the original ENIAC, following its architecture and basic circuit building." "We wanted to do it all from scratch," he said, adding that each connection had to be designed and laid out individual. "When I first heard about the project, I thought 'This won't be hard. How complex could the first computer have been?' " Ang said. "But it turned out to be more complicated than I had ever imagined." As opposed to most modern computers, the ENIAC system works with decimal rather than binary numbers, Van der Spiegel said. The chip will contain more than a quarter-million transistors in an 8x8 square millimeter of micron triple metal CMOS technology. In addition, the architecture is "highly parallel," and there are "no stored programs -- everything is done by connecting cables and mechanical switches," he added. The three students began the project by looking at ENIAC blueprints in the University Archives and the Smithsonian Institute. "It was a challenge to understand the circuitry," Van der Spiegel said. "The students had never seen anything like the old technology." For the microchip, this technology was adapted for modern-day transistor circuits. Even if one of the connections was wrong, the system would not work, and "once a mistake was made, it was like finding a needle in a hay stack," Van der Spiegel said. "Working day and night," what the Engineering group accomplished in six months is comparable to what a team of the best engineers working for Intel Corporation did in 10 man years, he added. Now that a design for the full chip has been completed, the next step is to ship it over the Internet to California, where it will take two months to produce replications. "Although the original chip was quite expensive and difficult to create, replication is fairly easy," Van der Spiegel said, adding that the National Science Foundation supplemented the test chip and that the replication project will be fully supported by the Atmel Corporation. Mass-produced chips, put on cards and plugged into PCs, "will allow students to explore the workings of the original ENIAC," he said. Several museums, including the Smithsonian, have also expressed interest in having a copy of the chip in their collections. And eventually, commemorative chips may be available as pins and paper weights, Van der Spiegel said.