First Microprocessor(4004)

Intel's First Microprocessor the Intel 4004




The Intel 4004 microprocessor, introduced in November 15, 1971 started an electronics revolution that changed our world.It is a 4 bit processor.

There were no customer-programmable microprocessors on the market before the 4004. It was the first and it was the enabling technology that propelled software into the limelight as a key player in the world of digital electronics design.This evolution was possible because of the tremendous advances in the semiconductor process techonology.The 4004 processor contained only ten thousand transistors while the components density increased more than three fold in less than a decade's time.
The 4004 microprocessor was first produced on a 2'' wafers and then on 3'' wafers.Today's microprocessors are produced on 12'' or 300mm wafers.It is composed of 5 layers.The 4004 employed a 10 µm silicon-gate enhancement load pMOS technology and could execute approximately 92,000 instructions per second.

Features
maximum clock speed is 740khz
separate program and data storage.In 4004, with its need to keep pin count down uses a single multiplexed 4-bit bus for the transferring of 12 bit addresses,8-bit instructions and 4 bit data words.
instruction set contains 46 instructions
register set contains 16 registers of 4bits size each