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Standard cells: Looking at individual gates in the Pentium processor


Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, a chip to "separate the really power-hungry folks from ordinary mortals." The origin...

In this article, I take a close look at the original Pentium chip 1, showing how much of its circuitry was built out of structured rows of tiny transistors, a technique known as standard-cell design. The result is that when the clock switches from low to high, the primary latch stops updating its output at the same time that the secondary starts passing this value through, providing the desired flip-flop behavior. The full standard-cell library is much larger, with dozens, if not hundreds, of different cells: many types of logic gates in a variety of sizes and drive strengths.

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