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ENIAC-on-a-Chip

By Jan Van Der Spiegel

Take the ENIAC, an 80 by 3 foot giant, and shrink it to t a silicon chip the size of your fingernail. Place the chip on a tiny circuit board. Connect the circuit board to a PC running graphical software simulating the ENIAC's look and feel. This is the recipe that students and faculty at the School of Engineering and Applied Science - with support from the National Science Foundation and Atmel Corporation - are using to create the ENIAC-on-a-Chip Kit, a teaching tool that dramatically illustrates the performance improvements brought about by semiconductor technology.

The chip preserves the ENIAC's original architecture and basic circuit building blocks as much as possible. To recreate the giant computer using modern technology, the ENIAC's 18,000 vacuum tubes and 170,000 resistors were modeled with 250,000 tiny transistors, mechanical switches were replaced with electronic ones, and digit and programming trunks were implemented as tiny metal lines interconnected through cross-point switches. The chip performs the same functions that its 30-ton prede cessor pioneered 50 years ago. ENIAC-on-a-Chip includes the following units:

	20 accumulators - the arithmetic workhorses, which also serve as memory elements
	constant transmitter - the module that allows initialization of the accumulators to a constant integer
	cycling unit - the master clock that synchronizes the operation of all modules
	initiation unit - the element that tells all modules when to start computation
	function table - the module that gives arbitrary functional dependence for the input
	master programmer - the higher level arithmetic coordina tor that allows more sophisticated programming of the chip
	high-speed multiplier - the module that manipulates the accumulators to perform multiplication
	square rooter - the module that manipulates the accumulators to perform square roots

Test fabrication of the accumulator sections of the ENIAC II chip. The actual test chip (center) measures less than a quarter on an inch square.

The chip, fabricated in a technology whose smallest features are .8 micrometers, is due back from the silicon foundry in mid-April. Following is a comparison between the ENIAC and ENIAC-on-a-Chip:

                       ENIAC     ENIAC-on-a Chip
Vacuum tubes          18,000                none
Transistors             none             250,000
Resistors            170,000                none
Capacitors            10,000                none
Footprint            80x3 ft              8x8 mm
Clock speed          100 kHz             20 MHz*
Power                 174 kW              0.5 W*
                                      *estimated

Once back from the foundry, the chip will be mounted on a small, printed circuit board and connected to a PC. The PC will be equipped with a graphical interface that allows a user to interact with the chip. The interface will display the front panels of the ENIAC with its pro gramming switches, control switches, and interconnection cables (digit lines and programming lines). The user will select the switches to generate the proper program settings and interconnections to create a data le. The le will be sent to the chip and the output of the chip (lights indicating the output of the accumulators) will be read back into the PC for display, allowing the user to evaluate results.

The ENIAC-on-a-Chip Kit, consisting of chip, printed circuit board, PC software, and a set of demonstration programs (data files), will be available to a variety of organizations and institutions, including the National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian. The multidi mensional educational and intellectual benefits of the kit will not only inspire students in engineering and science but will reach out to a larger audience ranging from historians to high school students and the public at large.

For more information about ENIAC-on-a-Chip, the Kit, and the student and faculty developers, see http://www.ee.upenn.edu/~jan/eniacproj.html.

JAN VAN DER SPIEGEL is Professor of Electrical Engineering at the School of Engineering and Applied Science.