A New IEEE Milestone: Development of the BELLMAC-32 Microprocessors, 1976–1982 [A New IEEE Milestone]

On 17 February 2025, the IEEE Board of Directors designated the BELLMAC-32 development as a historic milestone. Commemorative plaques will be placed on the walls of Nokia Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ, and the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. The Bell Labs Murray Hill research center was where most of the BELLMAC-32 R&D work was performed, and a group in Holmdel, NJ (a location no longer part of Bell Labs) along with a group in Naperville, IL was involved as well. When the BELLMAC-32 technology was created, this was the key research center for AT&T Bell Laboratories. Today, Murray Hill is the US location for Nokia Bell Labs. The plaque citation summarizing the achievement and its significance reads: “Developed between 1976 and 1982, the Bell Laboratories BELLMAC-32 microprocessor series introduced many seminal design concepts, including 32-bit wide internal and external transfers, high-speed domino circuits to reduce complex logic gate delay times, a twin-tub CMOS process for improved power efficiency and performance, interconnect-centric logic design for signal delay reduction, gate-matrix layout which increased density, and instructions which implemented certain UNIX operating system and C programming language operations.”