ITRI

Contents

• Overview
• Products
  • Keyboard encoders
  • Other parts
• Acknowledgements

Overview

ITRI, the Industrial Technology Research Institute (工業技術研究院), is a not-for-profit research and development institution in Taiwan, founded in 1973. ITRI’s Computer and Communications Research Laboratories department (CCL, CCL/ITRI or ITRI/CCL) was involved with the keyboard manufacturing industry in Taiwan and they provided microcontroller-based keyboard encoders to numerous customers. Chicony report that ITRI assisted them in developing their keyboard products. These commercial services have since been discontinued and ITRI no longer admit to having ever offered such a service.

CCL/ITRI chips, likely manufactured by Taiwanese firm TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited), are cryptically branded with a logo not found in any IC logo databases; this logo, “IC” enclosed within a “C”, sometimes read as “CIC”, denotes CCL IC production. The proportions of the logo vary from chip to chip; four variations of the logo are show below, starting with the most common form:

Products

As a Taiwanese organisation, ITRI served Taiwanese businesses. Confusingly, there is a Key Tronic keyboard with an ITRI encoder or microcontroller chip fitted. The Key Tronic keyboard was made in June 1982, and those logic chips with a readable date in the circuitry photograph are from 1982. It appears that the keyboard was later acquired and repurposed by way of a replacement chip from ITRI, in 1985 according to the date on the ITRI chip. The keyboard belonged to German collector Seebart, now presumed to have passed away. The exact operation of the keyboard is not clear; there is an EPROM-like chip on the PCB, suggesting that the ITRI chip is a ROM-less microcontroller. Unfortunately the EPROM-like chip is not labelled with a date, and the chip’s manufacture date is not legible in the photograph.

Keyboard encoders

CCL/ITRI chips appear be numbered sequentially, the numbers suggestive of ROM codes or mask numbers, rather than off-the-shelf part numbers. Their keyboard encoders are typically based around the 8049 microcontroller licensed from Intel; any encoder with a 1980 Intel copyright date is presumed to be 8049-based. The following examples are known, and are listed in manufacture date order:

Other parts

Very little is known of ITRI’s products. Other parts include:

• CIC8035E: unidentified DIP-40, most likely an Intel 8035
• CIC8039E: unidentified DIP-40, most likely an Intel 8039
• CIC5107AE: unidentified DIP-40
• CIC10476AE-80: unidentified DIP-28 “from [a] Bulgarian computer”
• CIC80520: listed as a “CCL. itri” part under the Cross Reference section of the Mosel Vitelic MSU2052/U2032 datasheet, a series of 8-bit microcontrollers; nothing is noted about precisely which Mosel Vitelic chip or chips it substitutes
• D24382E, claimed on Wikimedia Commons to be an EPROM

Acknowledgements

• John Culver of The CPU Shack for identifying the chips as CCL/ITRI
• Chicony Electronics for their insight
• Dr H C Chow for confirmation on ITRI’s involvement