Many or most readers of this site probably know that most chips (and PCBs) have the date of manufacture stamped on them, almost always indicating the year and week (usually not the actual date) they were made.
Especially with PCBs, there is no standard for whether the year or week comes first. For pre-millenial hardware that’s not a problem, because it’s unambiguous what’s the year and what’s the week. It’s a bit tricker when something like 0403 is stamped on a PCB—is that week 3 of 2004 or week 4 of 2003? In such cases, both might be plausible and one has to look further.
Chips more or less universally use the year/week convention, but some manufacturers label their products with a two-digit year and others only use a single digit. Intel is of course in the latter category. The above image shows a typical vintage Intel chip with a date code stamped on the bottom side of a chip and etched on the top (a 90 MHz Pentium, manufactured in week 15 of 1995). Note that there are actually three date codes, 515 on top, and 501/515 on the bottom of the chip. Intel makes things slightly difficult by often embedding the date code in a longer string, with the three-digit date code starting at the second position (the first might be a digit or a letter).
Most of the time, it’s easy to tell whether a date code like 927 means week 27 of 1979, 1989, 1999, or 2009. But sometimes the answer is not so obvious. Continue reading →
