15 Facts About Signetics 2650

Signetics 2650 was an 8-bit microprocessor introduced in July 1975.

When it was designed in 1972, the Signetics 2650 was among the most advanced designs on the market, easily outperforming and out-featuring the Intel 4004 and 8008 of the same era.

At the time, Signetics 2650 was heavily involved with Dolby Laboratories, developing integrated circuits that implemented Dolby's suite of noise-reduction systems.

Production of the Signetics 2650 was pushed back, and the CPU was not formally introduced until July 1975.

In March 1976, Signetics 2650 reached a second-source agreement with Advanced Memory Systems .

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AMS was already acting as a second-source for the RCA 1802, an advanced CMOS design, and the NMOS Signetics 2650 was seen as a useful adjunct that would not directly compete with the 1802.

Signetics 2650 tried again with National Semiconductor in 1977, who planned to introduce versions in the last quarter of the year.

Signetics 2650 contained an on-die call stack, rather than the more common solution that sets aside a location in memory to hold the stack.

Signetics 2650 was used in some large items of equipment such as the Tektronix 8540, a microprocessor software development system which supported various in-circuit emulator, trace memory and logic analyser cards for real-time debugging of microprocessor systems, as practiced in the 1980s.

The Signetics 2650 provided the base operating system functions, data transfer, and interface to a host computer or serial computer terminal.

Signetics 2650 was supplied in a 40 pin plastic or ceramic DIL enclosure.

Signetics 2650 had many unusual features when compared to other microprocessors of the time:.

The Signetics 2650 Assembler generated code as if it was the instruction IORZ, R0 instead.

Probably the most mini-computer like aspect of the Signetics 2650 is the enormous number of branch instructions; all these instructions could use indirection:.

In 1975, Signetics was sold to Philips and the 2650 was later incorporated into the Philips Semiconductors line.