On Sun, 05 Nov 2006 19:03:02 -0500, Meat Plow
opined:


Anyone know why it's called "jungle" ?

Because it's swampy mess that's swarming with exotic animals. It's a
chip where they've thrown in as many functions as they can, to keep
down the chip count. Canon used to use the name 'Octopus chip' for the
same sorts of chips, & some of their Octopus chips even had a cartoon
of an octopus on the package.
--
W
. | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because
\|/ \|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est
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On Tue, 07 Nov 2006 06:33:58 -0500, Meat Plow
opined:

That's cool. The term jungle has been around awhile. I think I first came
across it in the mid/late 80's.

Yep, that's when the industry realised that it was now cheaper to
shoehorn a bunch of functions into a big chip on one or two PCBs than
to build, connect & test twice as many PCBs. Canon lead the way with
that philosophy in other complex, high volume machines like copiers,
lasers, etc. It was always fun opening up their high end machines for
the first time, because they put cute pictures (like the octopus chip
I mentioned) on most of their other ASICs as well.
Sadly, it's all very boring these days.
--
W
. | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because
\|/ \|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est
---^----^---------------------------------------------------------------