Interviewed by Jerome T. Coonen on 2025-08-28 in Haifa, Israel
© Computer History Museum
Rafi Nave, Senior Researcher at the Samuel Neaman Institute, tells the silicon design story of the Intel 8087 Math Coprocessor. His small team of engineers in Haifa, Israel delivered a chip that set a new standard for the quality and accuracy of numerical computation and helped seal the fate of Intel with the IBM Personal Computer in 1981. When the architects in Santa Clara, California had proposed an arithmetic engine with multiple data types, scrupulous attention to every detail of every operation, and then included a complete family of elementary transcendental functions like tangent, arctangent, logarithm, and exponential – no one thought it could be done.
Rafi saw the opportunity. He accepted the challenge in early 1978 to build a companion chip for the new 16-bit 8086 CPU about to hit the market. This is the story of how the team laboriously drew by hand a chip 1 cm on a side at 1,000-to-1 magnification. They integrated a fast shifter that is essential to computer arithmetic. They patented an ingenious method to double the density of the embedded read-only memory. They rigorously verified the subtle new algorithms for all the mathematical operations, including the transcendental functions.
The story unfolds with how Rafi came to be the first engineer to arrive at Intel’s new Israel Design Center in 1974, and how Israel was already far along in semiconductor technology. This oral history tells the story of several intrepid engineers and their culture. It tells the story of a highly successful chip that introduced an international standard still going strong since the 8087 appeared in 1980.
- Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information – http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/300000148
Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ for more information about the Computer History Museum’s Oral History Collection.
Catalog number: 300000151
Acquisition number: 2025.0130
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