Lloyd's Accumatic 30 (Model EH-9036, Type 260D Hitachi)

The Accumatic 30 calculator sold by Lloyd's Electronics, Inc., Compton, California caught our attention when we were looking into the first single-chip calculator circuits manufactured by Sharp Electronics Corporation in Japan, just to discover that this model number was used between 1974 and 1976 with at least 12 different calculator designs sporting 4 different calculator brains.

The first version of the calculator, introduced in July 1974, was labeled Accumatic 30 (Model EH-9036) and sported like its successor Accumatic 30 (Model EH-9036, Type 255B) a Sharp LI2002 brain. Overall the LI2002 was a solid pick for a calculator with an 8-Digit display, the minus sign was always in a fixed position and not traveling, like with many other chips, during number entry from the right to the left. This allowed using a single LED as minus sign, early in 1974 still a cost saving measure. Another advantage of the LI2002 for the application in the Accumatic 30 is the signaling of error conditions like overflow or division by zero with an "8-Digit friendly" zero with all decimal points lit '. . . . . . .0. .' instead the more common 'C' or 'E' in the leftmost, omitted position of the display. We assume that this single-chip calculator circuit was discontinued by Sharp in 1974, we only noticed chips housed in rather expensive ceramic packages, never in the more economical plastic packages. Lloyd's consequently switched with the Accumatic 30 (Model EH-9036, Type 255C) to a Hitachi HD3633 brain, a chip clearly designed for 9-Digit displays, signaling all error conditions with the missing extra digit. This behavior is for the calculator user very confusing, the only obvious indicator of the error condition is the keyboard not responding to any other button then the [C] key. Lloyd's next move was changing the display from 8-Digits to 9-Digits and the Accumatic 30 (Model EH-9036, Type 255D) was centered around a Hitachi HD36290 chip. When NEC introduced its very competitive µPD940 single-chip calculator circuit, Lloyd's took advantage of its enhanced feature set and added three keys to the 19-keys of the Accumatic 30 (Model EH-9036-2, Type 255E):  [+/−] [√x] [PI].

And from here on it is getting really interesting! There are three more calculators in the Accumatic 30 line, first the Accumatic 30 (Model EH-9036, Type G) sporting the mentioned NEC µPD940 brain but falling back to the 19-keys of the early calculators. Next is the featured Accumatic 30 (Model EH-9036, Type 260D), virtually identical to the Accumatic 30 (Model EH-9036, Type 255D) with the Hitachi HD36290 introduced before the switch to NEC. And yes, we were talking about three more calculators, extremely confusing is the other Accumatic 30 (Model EH-9036, Type 260D) sporting the NEC µPD940 again like the Accumatic 30 (Model EH-9036, Type G). Comparing the two twins "Type 255D - Type 260D Hitachi" and "Type 255G - Type 260D NEC" reveals as expected only minor differences, all featured calculators were manufactured in a timeframe of just a few months.

Interestingly were both calculators supplied with the same instruction manual, despite the different implementation of the %-function of the two calculator brains:

Note: The manual is based as expected on the Hitachi HD36290 logic implementation.

Dismantling the featured Lloyd's Accumatic 30 (EH-9036, Type 260D Hitachi) calculator assembled by an unknown Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) in July 1975 in Taiwan reveals a very compact design based on a single-sided printed circuit board (PCB) for the main electronics, a single-sided PCB for the keyboard and powered by four disposable 1.5 Volts batteries or an external power adapter.

The Main-PCB is centered around HD36290 single-chip calculator circuit manufactured by Hitachi and the few other remaining components on the PCB are mainly used to generate the different supply voltages for the HD36290 and Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) and to bias the anodes and grids of the display with respect to its filament.

To gain some knowledge about the differences between the various single-chip calculator circuits used with the Lloyd's Accumatic 30, we decided here at the Datamath Calculator Museum to give the featured calculator a full "Teardown Treatment" and share our findings accordingly.

Calculating Unit: The HD36290 located in the featured calculator could be called the successor of the HD3633 known from the Accumatic 30 (EH-9036, Type 255C) and hampered by its "hard-wired" and buggy logic implementation. The HD36290 offers more flexibility, better algorithm and higher functionality than its predecessor due to switching to programmable ROMs for the calculator logic. It features an integrated clock oscillator and both its segment and digit output drivers are interfacing directly with low-voltage VFDs up to 35 Volts.

Display: The featured Lloyd's Accumatic 30 (EH-9036, Type 260D Hitachi) calculator manufactured in July 1975 makes use of an 9-Digit low-voltage VFD manufactured by Futaba and known as Type 9-CT-08, a noticeable change to the 8-Digit display and additional small red LED as Minus "dot" of the original Accumatic 30. The display is soldered with its 19 wires directly to the Main-PCB.

Display Driver: The term "low-voltage" Vacuum Fluorescent Display might be misleading when used together with a calculator powered by four 1.5 Volt batteries. Common VFDs used with portable electronic calculators are usually operated around 30 Volts, significantly higher than the 10 to 15 Volts operating voltage of single-chip calculator circuits used in the 1970s. While the first generation of Texas Instruments TMS0100 single-chip calculator circuits lacked any display drivers and left the choice of display technology to their customers, focused the second generation products mainly on Light-Emitting Diode (LED) technology. In or around 1974, most Western calculator designs still relied on rather expensive LED technology but Japanese companies like Casio, Sanyo, Sharp and Toshiba started to leverage the lower manufacturing costs of VFDs, instead. Texas Instruments introduced in 1974 consequently with the TMS0850 their first product series focused on battery operated VFD calculators and modified the integrated segment and digit output drivers to withstand up to -35 Volts. Hitachi on the other hand entered the marked of single-chip calculator circuits in 1973 and focused immediately on compatibility with VFDs. The HD36290 chips are manufactured in PMOS technology, meaning the output transistors are "high-side" switching and the most positive voltage of the chip is labeled V_SS for 0 Volt, all other voltages in the calculator are consequently negative with respect to V_SS. Multiplexed low-voltage VFDs need a voltage difference between its filament and the grids and anodes of the numbers of around 30 Volts to light up and to avoid "ghosting" while scanning, the deactivated grids and anodes should be slightly lower than the filament voltage. An elegant and very common solution is found with this Accumatic 30 calculator, too. The grids and anodes of the VFD are "pulled-down" with 17 resistors (150k Ohm) to around -29 Volts, the filament is biased to around -27 Volts (2.0k Ohm resistor) and the HD36290 switches the relevant grids and anodes to around 0 Volt to lit them up.

Clock: The Lloyd's Accumatic 30 makes use of the internal clock oscillator of the HD36290 single-chip calculator circuit, we identified a resistor with 180k Ohm connected between Pin 25 (R_EXT) of the HD36290 and the negative V_GG power supply line, resulting in a clock frequency of about 167 kHz.

Power Supply: The Lloyd's Accumatic 30 calculator is powered with four disposable AA-sized 1.5 Volt batteries or an external 6 Volt power adapter and uses a complex DC/DC converter to generate a total of four voltages:

We measured the operating current of the featured Lloyd's Accumatic 30 calculator for two different cases:

Calculating the power consumption at 6 Volts for the Lloyd's Accumatic 30 results in about 230 mW displaying a '0.' and about 250 mW with all segments but the minus sign illuminated. A very interesting result, a Canon LE-84 calculator with a LED display and using four disposable 1.5 Volt Alkaline batteries and a DC/DC converter for its TMS0801 chip clocks in at around 100 mW displaying a '0.' and 320 mW with all segments lit; showing both an advantage and disadvantage of LED-based calculators versus their VFD-based counterparts:

Keyboard: The keyboard assembly of the Lloyd's Accumatic 30 was manufactured by GICO and uses 19 spring-supported plastic keys pushing small fingers on stamped sheet-metal pieces against contacts etched on a single-sided phenolic PCB.

The keyboard module is connected with 13 pins to the Main-PCB (9 keyboard scan lines, 2 keyboard return lines, 2 contacts for the [C] key).

Here at the Datamath Calculator Museum we use the DCM-50A Platform to Characterize and Reverse-engineer Single-chip Calculator Circuits. Many designs of electronic calculators do not use all features of their calculator brains and it would be difficult to unleash the full potential of the calculator chips in these cases. Additionally are electronic calculators "closed systems" with limited flexibility to measure signals, change voltages or clock frequencies, provide additional input keys or even change the display technology or specifications additional digits. Core idea of the DCM-50A is providing a generic platform to access all features of a single-chip calculator circuit and with the DCM-50A (PLAYGROUND) we increased the scope from Texas Instruments products to offerings from their competitors in the 1970s, namely AMI, Cal-Tex, Commodore/MOS Technology, Electronic Arrays, General Instrument, Hitachi, Litronix, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Mostek, National Semiconductor, NEC, Omron, RFT, Rockwell, Sharp, Toshiba, and Western Digital.

The Accumatic 30 sold by Lloyd's mid of the Seventies went through many redesigns within its lifecycle of around 2 years and we started to look into the differences of the four different single-chip calculator circuits located in at least 12 different design iterations. Learn more about our observations here.

If you have additions to the above article please email: joerg@datamath.org.

© Joerg Woerner, November 19, 2024. No reprints without written permission.