Semiconductor & Computer Engineering
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Revision as of 01:38, 31 December 2013
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The Novix NC4016 was a 16-bit, stack machine microprocessor designed by Novix Inc in 1985 primarily for the Forth programming language. The NC4016 directly executes the primitives of the high-level Forth programming language. The NC4016 was capable of executing typical Forth programs as much as 20 times faster than the Motorola 68000. Novix also offered the NC4000 Small C Compiler which was compatible with the NC4016 microprocessor.
In 1988, the NC4016 design was licensed and improved by Harris Semiconductor which later rebranded the chip as the RTX2000, a radiation hardened version suitable for spacecrafts use.
Implementation
Due to the limitations in the gate array technology of the time, the chip did not have any on-chip memory. Three separate modules were required: for the return stack, data stack, and program and data stack.