This is an old revision of the document!
The site is a collection of wiki pages with many different indexing schemes. You can find pages by any one of these indexes however in some cases information about a given chip is unknown or unavailable so it won't be in an index. Here are the current indexes and a brief description of what they're good for.
Collection: Look at what each of our members has in his/her personal collection. Useful for finding a chip you sent someone for analysis or checking out who's interested in a given type of device.
Foundry: Devices sorted by the foundry (the manufacturing plant). Note that this is often not the same company that designed the device. Useful for comparing the capabilities of different fabs and trying to figure out which fab may have made an unknown device.
Process technology: Devices sorted by technology node. Useful for trying to figure out the age or technology level of an unknown device.
Type: Devices sorted hierarchially by their functionality. Useful for casual browsing. If you have an unmarked part but have a rough guess of what it does, this is a good way to find known parts to compare it to.
Vendor: Links to pages on chip design companies. These pages contain a list of devices designed by that company, as well as historical background on mergers/acquisitions, major technology developments, product families, etc.
Year: Devices sorted by the year they were taped out (date on the die,
not package date code which may be much more recent). Useful for studying how technology has changed over time, or trying to estimate how old an unknown device is.
In addition to these, we have a few random pages filed under the “other” category that are not about specific chips.
