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54-621: The chip was designed by Al Charpentier in 1977 but Commodore could not find a market for the chip. In 1979, MOS Technology began work on a video chip named MOS Technology 6564 intended for the TOI computer and had also made some work on another chip, MOS 6562 intended for a color version of the Commodore PET . Both of these chips failed due to memory timing constraints (both required very fast and thus expensive SRAM , making them unsuitable for mass production). Before finally starting to use

108-497: A pure-play semiconductor foundry , so they had to join a chip-building company to produce their new CPU. MOS was a small firm with good credentials in the right area, the east coast of the US. The team of four design engineers was headed by Chuck Peddle and included Bill Mensch . At MOS they set about building a new CPU that would outperform the 6800 while being similar to it in purpose and much less expensive. The resulting 6501 design

162-517: A cash deal valued at $ 7.4 billion including the repayment of debt. This acquisition brings back together two of the former General Instrument companies from the 1997 split. General Instrument produced receivers for old C and Ku band satellites. They also produced Videocipher units as well as digital equipment. 4DTV was a system for picking up free and encrypted analog and digital satellite subscription channels. It also included an interactive guide. The product line included: American Totalisator

216-486: A few minor differences: an added on-chip clock oscillator, a different functional pinout arrangement, generation of the SYNC signal (supporting single-instruction stepping), and removal of data bus enablement control signals (DBE and BA, with the former directly connected to the phase 2 clock instead). It outperformed the more-complex 6800 and Intel 8080 , but cost much less and was easier to work with. Although it did not have

270-498: A few months later. After being called Connected Home Solutions, it was renamed Home and Networks Mobility in 2007. When Motorola split on January 4, 2011, this division became part of Motorola Mobility . On December 19, 2012, ARRIS announced that it would acquire Motorola Mobility's Home unit (the former GI company) from Google for $ 2.35 billion in cash and stock. The acquisition was completed on April 17, 2013. On November 8, 2018, CommScope announced that it would acquire ARRIS in

324-427: A radio manufacturer, which was fully merged in 1951. In April 1957 they added Radio Receptor Company, in 1959 Harris Transducer, and among their more notable purchases, closed General Transistor in 1960. Most of these were left to operate as wholly-owned but independent divisions. The buying continued through the 1960s, added Signalite in 1966 and Universal Controls and American Totalisator in 1967. A more major purchase

378-458: Is likely the reason why the machine was sold with just 5 KB of RAM. Memory expansions for the VIC-20 either used SRAM as well or implemented their own refresh circuit. The VIC was programmed by manipulating its 16 control registers , memory mapped to the memory address range $ 9000–$ 900F in the VIC-20 address space. The on-chip A/D converters were used for dual paddle position readings by

432-405: The cable television field, emerging as the primary supplier in this market by the late 1980s. They sold off their IC division to form Microchip Technology in 1987, leaving them almost entirely dependent on the television market. GI became a major leader in the development of high definition television . As this market began to saturate, the company split into three parts in 1997; CommScope took

486-475: The 1950s, the company began a series of acquisitions under the direction of Moses Shapiro. Among the more notable purchases was General Transistor in 1960, which led to GI becoming a major producer of transistors , and later, integrated circuits (ICs). By the late 1960s, the company was mostly depending on sales into the television industry, which was further bolstered by the 1967 purchase of Jerrold Electronics . The company changed markets continually. Through

540-725: The 1970s they focused mostly on the off-track betting market through their purchase of American Totalisator , but this market faced significant competition in the late 1970s. At this time, GI became well known for their IC's including the CP1600 used in the Mattel Intellivision game console , the AY-3-8910 series of sound chips that were used in a huge variety of designs, and the PIC microcontrollers which remain in production as of 2024 . They also became increasingly active in

594-458: The 6501's advantage of being able to be used in place of the Motorola 6800 in existing hardware, it was so inexpensive that it quickly became more popular than the 6800, making that a moot point. The 6502 was so cheap that many people believed it was a scam when MOS first showed it at a 1975 trade show. They were not aware of MOS's masking techniques and when they calculated the price per chip at

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648-447: The 6502 chip. At Commodore, Peddle convinced the owner, Jack Tramiel , that calculators were a dead end, and that home computers would soon be huge. However, the original design group appeared to be even less interested in working for Jack Tramiel than it had for Motorola, and the team quickly started breaking up. One result was that the newly completed 6522 (VIA) chip was left undocumented for years. Bill Mensch left MOS even before

702-586: The 6502 was, the company itself was having problems. At about the same time the 6502 was being released, MOS's entire calculator IC market collapsed, and its prior existing products stopped shipping. Soon they were in serious financial trouble. Another company, Commodore Business Machines (CBM), had invested heavily in the calculator market and was also nearly wiped out by TI 's entry into the market. A fresh injection of capital saved CBM, and allowed it to invest in company suppliers in order to help ensure their IC supply would not be upset in this fashion again. Among

756-459: The 6502—were achieving a success rate of 70 percent or better. This meant that not only were its designs faster, but they also cost much less as well. When the 6501 was announced, Motorola launched a lawsuit almost immediately. Although the 6501 instruction set was not compatible with the 6800, it could nevertheless be plugged into existing motherboard designs because it had the same functional pin arrangement and IC package footprint. That

810-468: The 650x line from MOS, including Rockwell International , GTE , Synertek , and Western Design Center (WDC) . A number of different versions of the basic CPU, known as the 6503 through 6507, were offered in 28-pin packages for lower cost. The various models removed signal or address pins. Far and away the most popular of these was the 6507 , which was used in the Atari 2600 and Atari disk drives. The 6504

864-820: The Commodore Semiconductor Group superfund site. Most of the MOS chips are named according to following rules, which shows used technology (logic gate design): 40°07′27.9″N 75°25′07.2″W  /  40.124417°N 75.418667°W  / 40.124417; -75.418667 General Instrument General Instrument ( GI ) was an American electronics manufacturer based in Horsham, Pennsylvania , specializing in semiconductors and cable television equipment. They formed in New York City in 1923 as an electronics manufacturer. During

918-529: The Commodore takeover, and moved home to Arizona. After a short stint consulting for a local company called ICE, he set up the Western Design Center (WDC) in 1978. As a licensee of the 6502 line, their first products were bug-fixed, power-efficient CMOS versions of the 6502 (the 65C02 , both as a separate chip and embedded inside a microcontroller called the 65C150). But then they expanded

972-531: The PET had a backslash (\) in its character set, this was replaced on the VIC-20 (and all subsequent Commodore machines) with a British pound sign (£). Programmable characters are the only way of creating graphics and animation on the VIC as the chip does not have sprites or an all-points-addressable bitmap mode. Of the 16 colors in the palette, eight may be used for the foreground (per the color RAM at $ 9400) and border while

1026-431: The VIC in the VIC-20, chip designer Robert Yannes fed features from the 6562 (a better sound generator) and 6564 (more colors) back to the 6560, so before beginning mass production for the VIC-20 it had been thoroughly revised. Its features include: Unlike many other video circuits of the era, it does not offer dynamic RAM refresh capabilities. Thus the VIC-20 employed the more expensive static RAM (SRAM) chips. This

1080-549: The VIC-20, which also used the VIC's light pen facility. The VIC preceded the much more advanced VIC-II , used by the VIC-20's successors, the C64 and C128 . VIC-20s with expansion RAM have their video memory (550 bytes) at $ 1000 and when it is not present, $ 1E00. User-defined character sets must be placed within the first 5k of system RAM. The default PETSCII character ROM is at $ 8000 and each character takes 8 bytes to store. Up to 128 characters may be used at any one time. While

1134-406: The ability to "fix" its masks after they had been produced. This meant that as flaws in the design were discovered, the masks could be removed from the aligners, fixed, and put back in. This allowed them to rapidly drive out flaws in the original masks. The company's production lines typically reversed the numbers others were achieving; even the early runs of a new CPU design—what would become

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1188-460: The aftermath; those that survived did so by finding other chips to produce. MOS became a supplier to Atari , producing a custom single-chip Pong system. Things changed dramatically in 1975. Several of the designers of the Motorola 6800 left Motorola shortly after its release, after management told them to stop working on a low-cost version of the design. At the time there was no such thing as

1242-424: The aligners by the truckload. This meant that if a flaw was found in the design, it would cost a significant amount of money to fix it, as all the older masks would have to be thrown out. In contrast, with Micralign there was only one mask per aligner, so there was no inherent cost in replacing the mask if need be, although the cost, and especially time, of producing these master masks was considerable. MOS developed

1296-576: The betting systems as the company's primary profit center. In October 1982 they won a $ 100 million contract to supply over 300 cable TV stations with head end systems. Through the mid-1980s the company suffered a series of reversals. Looking for new markets, in 1986 they bought M/A-COM's cable division. M/A-COM had earlier purchased VideoCipher, who had developed the industry-standard system for scrambling and decoding satellite television signals, VideoCipher II. This product took some time to start to sell, but by 1987 they were seeing demand outstrip supply. By

1350-604: The cable infrastructure products, NextLevel the consumer television side, and General Semiconductor the power electronics products. NextLevel took over the GI name the next year. This new GI was purchased by Motorola in 2000, which was in turn purchased by Google who spun out the television side to ARRIS . ARRIS was then purchased by CommScope in 2018, once again bringing together all of GI's original television divisions. General Semiconductor continues to operate separately. Moses Shapiro, father of former Monsanto head Robert B. Shapiro ,

1404-529: The company's financials improved, the buying spree started anew, buying another five companies by 1975. This had turned them into a $ 500-million-a-year company, but left them deeply in debt. Shapiro retired in 1975 and was replaced by Frank Hickey, who focused the company on its two most profitable markets, cable television and gaming. The gaming market was primarily through their purchase of American Totalisator, who ran racetrack systems. GI expanded this into off-track betting and by 1979 they supplied 90% of all

1458-518: The company, operating under the name GMT Microelectronics ( G reat M ixed-signal T echnologies ), reopened MOS Technology's original, circa-1970 one-micrometre process fab ( semiconductor fabrication plant ) in Audubon , Montgomery County , Pennsylvania that Commodore had closed in 1993. The plant had been on the EPA's National Priorities List of hazardous waste sites since October 4, 1989. This

1512-433: The current industry yield rates, it did not add up. But any hesitation to buy it evaporated when both Motorola and Intel dropped the prices on their own designs from $ 179 to $ 69 at the same show in order to compete. Their moves legitimized the 6502, and by the show's end, the wooden barrel full of samples was empty. The 6502 would quickly go on to be one of the most popular chips of its day. A number of companies licensed

1566-457: The emerging high definition television (HDTV) market. To continue operations they laid off large numbers of staff, mostly at the headquarters. In 1992 they demonstrated their HDTV system and won a contract for 100,000 compressors. This led Rumsfeld to launch an initial public offering in 1993, after which he left the company in August. The HDTV market stabilized the company for a time, but by

1620-491: The end of the year they had total sales of $ 1.16 billion. This success was short-lived, and by 1990 they were once again operating at a loss. In August 1990, the company was purchased in a friendly leveraged buyout of $ 1.6 billion by the FLGI Holding. In October 1990, they announced that Hickey would be replaced by Donald Rumsfeld . He sold off several divisions to cut overhead. The company then began investing heavily in

1674-566: The firm basically became Commodore's production arm, they continued using the name MOS for some time so that manuals would not have to be reprinted. After a while MOS became the Commodore Semiconductor Group (CSG) . Despite being renamed to CSG, all chips produced were still stamped with the old "MOS" logo until week 22/23 of 1989. MOS had previously designed a simple computer kit called the KIM-1 , primarily to "show off"

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1728-458: The line greatly with the introduction of the 65816 , a fairly straightforward 16-bit upgrade of the original 65C02 that could also run in 8-bit mode for compatibility. Since then WDC moved much of the original MOS catalog to CMOS, and the 6502 continued to be a popular CPU for the embedded systems market, like medical equipment and car dashboard controllers. After Commodore's bankruptcy in 1994, Commodore Semiconductor Group, MOS's successor,

1782-606: The mid-90s other entrants were once again eroding the company's profits. In 1997 the company split into three parts, General Semiconductor (power electronics), CommScope (cable infrastructure) and NextLevel Systems (cable and satellite systems). NextLevel took over the GI name in February 1998. The "new" GI Corporation was acquired by Motorola in January 2000 for $ 17 billion and became the new Broadband Communication Sector (BCS) along with an acquisition of Zenith Network Systems

1836-508: The off-track systems in North America. By 1980, Hickey had managed to sell off most of the poorly-performing divisions and company debt had been reduced from 100% of assets to 20%. The success with American Totalisator began to wane as other companies, notably Control Data and Datatrol , began to push down profits. But any losses in this market were overshadowed by the massive expansion of cable television, which quickly took over from

1890-453: The others are limited to the background and auxiliary multicolors. The MSB of the color RAM is a flag used to indicate if that character is multicolor or high resolution. Due to the extreme blockiness of the former, most VIC-20 games use hires characters. The VIC does not support scrolling or raster interrupts like on the VIC-II, but the scanline counters could be polled for a specific point on

1944-496: The screen to produce raster effects. This feature was rarely used in games except for a few titles like Imagic's Demon Attack . Sound programming on the VIC is done by placing a frequency value in one of the four registers at $ 900A-$ 900D (they are turned off by writing a zero to them). The first three are square wave generators pitched half an octave from each other and the fourth is for white noise. The VIC has 16 read/write registers listed below: The full palette of sixteen colors

1998-580: The several companies were LED display manufacturers, power controllers, and suppliers of the driver chips, including MOS. In late 1976, CBM, publicly traded on the NYSE with a market capitalization around US$ 60 million , purchased MOS (whose market cap was around US$ 12 million ) in an all-stock deal. Holders of MOS received a 9.4 percent equity stake in CBM on the condition that Chuck Peddle would join Commodore as chief engineer. The deal went through, and while

2052-608: The site. Announced in March 1999, GMT would have provided foundry services based on TelCom's Bipolar and SiCr (silicon chromium) Thin Film Resistor processes and would have been a licensed alternate source for TelCom's Bipolar based products, with production running at 10,000 5-inch semiconductor wafers per month, producing CMOS , BiCMOS, NMOS, bipolar and SOI ( silicon on insulator ) devices. In 2000, GMT Microelectronics discontinued operations and abandoned all of its assets at

2106-501: Was Jerrold Electronics in December 1967, which became the company's consumer-facing brand for television-related products, mostly through their cable television products. 1970 saw a series of layoffs and downsizing as the poorly performing parts of the conglomerate began to drag down profits. As part of this, the company's interest in several cable television stations were sold off, mostly through their Jerrold division. As soon as

2160-527: Was GI's original cable TV brand, active from 1948 into the early 1990s. Around 1993, GI dropped the Jerrold name from their product lines. The Jerrold brand was prominent on both addressable and non-addressable cable TV converter boxes that were used on non-cable ready sets and cable-ready sets with premium pay services. "Jerrold" is the middle name of the company's founder, Milton Jerrold Shapp , who became Pennsylvania's 40th governor in 1971. Shapp's given name

2214-544: Was Milton Shapiro. GI Microelectronics was a manufacturer of LSI circuits and a pioneer in MOS technology and Electrically Alterable ROM ( EAROM ), with both off-the-shelf and custom circuits. GI spun the division off as Microchip Technology in 1987. In 1980, their product catalog included: Other products included the famous AY-3-8910/11/12/14 series of sound chips , the AY-3-85xx , 86xx, 87xx series of game chips and

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2268-460: Was a semiconductor design and fabrication company based in Audubon, Pennsylvania . It is most famous for its 6502 microprocessor and various designs for Commodore International 's range of home computers . Three former General Instrument executives, John Paivinen, Mort Jaffe and Don McLaughlin, formed MOS Technology in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania in 1969. The Allen-Bradley Company

2322-500: Was a division of General Instrument Corp. It manufactured tote boards for the horse racing industry. It is now owned by horse-track operator Magna Entertainment Corporation . Underseas Lab, a division of General Instrument Corp., located in Westwood, Massachusetts . It invented and manufactured multibeam sonars used in ocean floor mapping. It was acquired by Channel Technologies and is now owned by L-3 Communications . Jerrold

2376-457: Was a similar inversion in pricing. The 6800 sold in small lots for $ 295 ; with no other changes than using a Micralign , the same design could sell for $ 42 . The change to the Micralign revealed a further advantage. Previously the masks were mass-produced by photography companies like Kodak , who would make tens of thousands of copies of a master mask, or " reticle ", and ship the masks to

2430-417: Was bought by its former management for about $ 4.3 million , plus an additional $ 1 million to cover miscellaneous expenses including a United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) license. Dennis Peasenell became CEO. In December 1994, the EPA entered into a Prospective Purchase Agreement (limiting the company's liability in exchange for sharing the costs of cleanup) with GMT Microelectronics. In 1994,

2484-472: Was chairman from 1969 to 1975. Frank G. Hickey served as chief executive officer from 1975 to 1990, as did Donald Rumsfeld from 1990 to 1993. The company initially formed in New York City in 1923 as an electronics manufacturer. In the 1950s, the company president Moses Shapiro began buying a variety of electronics companies, mostly from the New York area. An early purchase was F. W. Sickles Company,

2538-474: Was complete. In 1974 Perkin-Elmer publicly introduced the Micralign system, the first projection scanner. Instead of placing the mask on the surface of the chip, it held it far from the surface and used highly accurate optics to project the image. Masks now lasted for thousands of copies instead of tens, and the flaw rate of the chips inverted so that perhaps 70% of the chips produced would work. The result

2592-411: Was due to a 1978 leak of trichloroethylene (TCE) from an underground 250-gallon concrete storage tank used by Commodore Business Machines in the semiconductor cleaning process. Leaks from the tank had caused the local groundwater to become contaminated with TCE and other volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in 1978. By 1999 GMT Microelectronics had $ 21 million in revenues and 183 employees working on

2646-475: Was enough to allow Motorola to sue. Allen-Bradley sold back its shares to the founders, sales of the 6501 basically stopped, and the lawsuit would drag on for many years before MOS was eventually forced to pay US$ 200,000 in fines. In the meantime MOS had started selling the 6502 , a chip capable of operating at 1  MHz in September 1975 for a mere US$ 25 . It was nearly identical to the 6501, with only

2700-411: Was generated based on variations of YPbPr signals: Note: Y has 5 possible values (0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1); Pb and Pr have 7 possible values (-0.9238795, −0.7071068, −0.3826834, 0, 0.3826834, 0.7071068, 0.9238795) MOS Technology MOS Technology, Inc. ("MOS" being short for Metal Oxide Semiconductor ), later known as CSG (Commodore Semiconductor Group) and GMT Microelectronics ,

2754-549: Was looking to provide a second source for electronic calculators and their chips designed by Texas Instruments (TI). In 1970 Allen-Bradley acquired a majority interest in MOS Technology. In the early 1970s, TI decided to release their own line of calculators, instead of selling just the chips inside them, and introduced them at a price that was lower than the price of the chipset alone. Many early chip companies were reliant on sales of calculator chips and were wiped out in

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2808-413: Was placed directly on the surface of the chip, which had the significant disadvantage that it sometimes pulled away materials from the chip, which were then copied to subsequent chips. This caused the mask to become useless after about a dozen copies, and resulted in the vast majority of chips having fatal flaws; for a complex chip like the 6800, only about 10% of the chips would work once the masking process

2862-473: Was sometimes used in printers. MOS also released a series of similar CPUs using external clocks, which added a "1" to the name in the third digit, as the 6512 through 6515. These were useful in systems where the clock support was already being provided on the motherboard by some other source. The final addition was the "crossover" 6510 , used in the Commodore 64 , with additional I/O ports. However successful

2916-407: Was somewhat similar to the 6800, but by using several design simplifications, the 6501 would be up to four times faster. Previous CPU designs, like the 6800, were produced using a device known as a contact aligner . This was essentially a complex photocopier , which optically reproduced a CPU design, or "mask", on the surface of the silicon chip. The name "contact" referred to the fact that the mask

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