Panafacom was a Japanese

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circ ...

design firm formed on 2 July 1973 by a consortium including

Fujitsu is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services corporation, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. Fujitsu is the world's sixth-largest IT services provider by annual revenue, and the la ...

Fuji Electric , operating under the brand name FE, is a Japanese electrical equipment company, manufacturing pressure transmitters, flowmeters, gas analyzers, controllers, inverters, pumps, generators, ICs, motors, and power equipment. History Fuji Electric ...

and Matsushita (Panasonic). The company was formed to design and manufacture the MN1610, a

16-bit 16-bit microcomputers are microcomputers that use 16-bit microprocessors. A 16-bit register can store 216 different values. The range of integer values that can be stored in 16 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two ...

. It was released in April 1975, beating the

Texas Instruments Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American technology company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, that designs and manufactures semiconductors and various integrated circuits, which it sells to electronics designers and manufacturers globa ...

TMS9900 to become the world's first single-chip 16-bit microprocessor. The design saw relatively little use and remains largely unknown in the computer field. In 1987, Panafacom was merged with

USAC Electronic Industrial USAC may refer to: * Unified Speech and Audio Coding, an audio compression scheme * United States Army Cadet Corps, a non-profit youth education organization * United States Auto Club, a sanctioning body for auto racing in the United States * Un ...

to form today's

PFU Limited is a Japanese information technology company. The company was formed by the merger of Panafacom and USAC Electronic Industrial in 1987. As of 2019, PFU focuses on computing and IT consulting. Its product line includes image scanners, embedded ...

References

External links

L-16A CPU
A description (in Japanese) of the MN1610 processor.

A description (in Japanese) of the MN1613 processor. {{corp-stub 16-bit microprocessors