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Interesting BiCMOS circuits in the Pentium, reverse-engineered
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, establishing a long-running brand of processors. Earlier, I wrote about the ROM in t...
Zooming in to the bottom of the chip shows the constant ROM, holding 86-bit words: at the left, the exponent section provides 18 bits. At the top of the photo, vertical bus lines are visible; these extend for long distances through the floating point unit. These long wires have a lot of capacitance so a high-current driver circuit is needed and the NPN transistor provides extra "oomph."
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