This listing is for an extremely rare 1989 nCube2 silicon wafer in excellent condition. This wafer is 4" in diameter and has a number of complete computer chips on it.
The chips are nCube2 microprocessors. These 14mm square chips are huge compared other chips of its time.Easily viewable under even a modest USB microscope.This wafer has been tested with the bad chips marked with black dots. Chips of this time were generally half the size of these microprocessors to increase yield. nCube built supercomputers to compete with Cray and IBM. nCube's approach to supercomputing was with massive parallelism. This is the second generation nCube microprocessor developed under Larry Ellison (Oracle), who was CEO and majority shareholder. It had much more than double the computing power of the 1st generation and consolidated many 1st generation functions on to a single chip, hence its size. The nCube2 gave nCube a significant competitive advantage at the time. The nCube2 microprocessor had two versions. The first ran at 25MHz and was used in the nCube 2 supercomputer, the second ran at 30MHz and was used in the nCube 2S supercomputer. This wafer's chips are the first version type.Here is a chance to own a piece of supercomputing history, an extremely rare historic museum quality collectible The wafer would make a great display, and/or gift!About Silicon Wafers:Computer chips start out as ordinary sand, which is silicon dioxide. However, the silicon must be made very, very pure. The first step is to melt the sand, in a furnace that reaches about 3200F degrees, and mix with carbon. This first purification process creates 99% pure Silicon, a common output is Silicon Caroffere. The Silicon Caroffere is processed in a trichlorosilane distillation method to create 99.9999% pure silicon called polycrystalline silicon. The polysilicon is broken up into chunks. These chunks are melted in a crucible at about 2500F degrees. A silicon crystal seed is dipped in molten silicon and slowly drawn out to create a cylinder of silicon. These silicon cylinders are some of the purest crystals on the planet. Once the silicon cylinder is grown to the desired diameter, it is sawed into wafers. These wafers are polished to achieve a very flat mirror surface. Transistors, and other micro-electronic parts, are built on the polished wafer. The wafer is then sawed into its individual chips. Each chip is mounted in an electronic package that serves to protect it and connect it to the outside world. It has been said that computer chips are the greatest value added product in the world. We essentially take a pile of sand and change it into thousands of dollars worth of computer chips.nCUBE was a series of parallel computing computers from the company of the same name. Early generations of the hardware used a custom microprocessor. With its final generations of servers, nCUBE no longer designed custom microprocessors for machines, but used server-class chips manufactured by a third party in massively parallel hardware deployments, primarily for the purposes of on-demand video.