Canon
Canon is a big electronic manufacturer based in Japan. A Canon laser printer was the first product that used the first embedded processor of Series 32000, the NS32CG16.
LBP-A404E
According to the Canon web site, the laser printer LBP-A404E was released on September 10, 1992. The CPU of this printer was the NS32CG16. Figure 1 shows the mainboard of the printer. I got the photo from Mr. Asano from Japan. He has made a website about the mainboard with more detailed photos and infos (if you can read japanese...): electrelic.com/electrelic/node/356
Fig. 1. The mainboard of the laser printer LBP-A404E. The grid in the background is 1 cm.
Canon Printer ???
The board in Figure 2 is obviously a part of a Canon product. The NS32CG16V-15 CPU is the heart of the system. It would be interesting to know what does the other part of National Semiconductor. The device named HPC46083WZU/V20 may be a gate array.
Fig. 2. The mainboard of an unknown Canon laser printer.
An interesting device is the chip named HN62408P which is packaged in a 42-pin DIP. It is located in the lower right corner. This device is an 8 MBit ROM which delivers data in 8-bit or 16-bit format. It is used as a character ROM especially for the many complex japanese characters.
If you like the photo in Figure 2 you can see it in higher resolution here.
This chapter was last modified on 4 May 2018. Next chapter: CED