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Concept
Motorola 68020
Summary
The Motorola 68020 ("sixty-eight-oh-twenty", "sixty-eight-oh-two-oh" or "six-eight-oh-two-oh") is a 32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1984. A lower-cost version was also made available, known as the 68EC020. In keeping with naming practices common to Motorola designs, the 68020 is usually referred to as the "020", pronounced "oh-two-oh" or "oh-twenty".
The 020 was in the market for a relatively short time. The Motorola 68030 was announced in September 1986 and began deliveries in the summer of 1987. Priced about the same as the 020 of the time, the 030 was significantly faster and quickly replaced in 020 in almost every use.
At the time the Motorola 68000 was designed, Motorola's design and fabrication services were outdated. Although even small companies like MOS Technologies and Zilog had moved on to silicon gate depletion mode NMOS logic on ever-larger wafers, Motorola was still using metal gates and enhancement mode and their largest fab worked on 4-inch wafers long after most lines had moved to 5-inch. Although the 68000 met the goal of being the fastest CPU available when it was introduced, it was not nearly as powerful as it could be if it had been designed with more modern techniques.
During the period of the 68000 design, the company was working with Hitachi on their process technology and as part of this they opened a new fab, MOS-8, using 5-inch wafers and the latest HMOS process licensed from Intel. This line was capable of building all of the new techniques, but the 68000 went ahead with the older design as they were sure it would work. Moving to new design techniques would wait until the design was in the market. The conversion to the new design techniques took place during the Motorola 68010 effort, a relatively minor upgrade to the original design that added basic virtual memory support for the emerging Unix workstation market.
As this effort was ongoing, Motorola was canvassing their customers for their desires for future developments in the line. These all pointed to a fully 32-bit implementation.
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