Re: [colorforth] i21

[Jeff Fox <fox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Richard Collins wrote:

> 

> Does anyone know what happened to ITVC and the i21?



Yes, but it is a very long story.



> I am interested as the i21 appears to be the only 

> chip of Chucks which was made "commercially in 

> quantity production", quote from

> http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/spinoff1998/ct12.htm. 

> Correct me if I am wrong.



i21 never went into production.  iTV made prototype chips

which were used to build prototypes.  The company raised

about 10M and then spent it.  One other important thing

was that they intended to sell products based on their

chips, rather than chips.  UltraTechnology and Offete

Enterprises Inc. were the only companies that worked with

Chuck that had plans to make chips available to

people not just in their own products.



> If the i21 did make it to commercially quality 

> production, where are they, and who should I talk 

> to about getting hold of 10-20 of them?



It didn't.  The last production run was F21D in late 
1998. Mosis shut down their .8u fab early in 1999.
That followed i21t where the thermal fix was tested.

F21D had the same CPU and serial I/O processors as

i21n which was the most stable CPU up to that point.  

UltraTechnology and iTV had a joint development

relationship and i21 was more or less a subset of the

circuits in F21 but with a simpler serial coprocessor

and a second serial coprocessor designed for keyboard

interface.  UltraTechnology was suppose to be able
to license the iTV web browser and email software
since it was also compatible with F21.

But even on i21 the software supported

software drivers for running the serial devices off

the parallel port w/o using the serial coprocessors.

So on prototype chips where the serial coprocessors

did not function properly we merely set a flag

in the software build to use the same hardware pins,

but through the parallel port interface.



For about a year, 1998-1999, iTV offered development

systems. Their original asking price was $500,000

in order to only deal with large companies that wanted

hundreds of millions of units just to try them out.

By 1998 they bought several other companies and

patents and spent all their money.  They laid off

their employees and languished for a couple more 

years.  In that period they sold a few i21 development
systems for about $2500 which is what they figured
it cost them to build them.



p21 went into production in 1994 and 5000 units were

made, but only about 1000 were packaged in DIPs 

and a couple of years later Ting had more packaged

in PLCC, but most were never packaged as it was

rather expensive since only a few were ever sold.

It cost Ting about 100K to sell chips at

about what they cost him.  About the same thing

for F21.



25 f21 were made in 1998.  There was an amazing

lack of interest and most of the chips were given

away to anyone who showed interest by writing

software on the free simulators that had been

available for many years or by making PCB.  4 

were sold, several were stolen.  



best wishes,

Jeff Fox

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