Bell Labs’ Bellmac-32 paved the way for today’s smartphone chips

In the late 1970s, a time when 8-bit processors were state of the art and CMOS was the underdog of semiconductor technology, engineers at AT&T’s Bell Labs took a bold leap into the future. They made a high-stakes bet to outpace IBM, Intel, andother competitors in chip performance by combining cutting-edge 3.5-micron CMOS fabrication with a novel 32-bit processor architecture.