A Maker Rebuilt the F-14 Tomcat's Secret Flight Computer, Then 3D Printed the Jet

The chip that Intel's 4004 overshadowed

There is a quiet argument among chip historians about which device was truly the first microprocessor. Most people say Intel's 4004, from 1971. A dedicated camp points instead to the MP944, which entered service inside the U.S. Navy's F-14 Tomcat in June 1970, over a year earlier. The MP944 stayed classified until 1998, so Intel got the headlines and the MP944 got forgotten.

The MP944 was the brain of the Tomcat's Central Air Data Computer, the CADC. It was a 20-bit, pipelined, parallel multi-chip system running at 375 kHz and crunching 9,375 instructions per second. Its job was to calculate altitude, airspeed, and Mach number in real time, and to drive the jet's signature swing-wing mechanism. Designed by Steve Geller and Ray Holt with a 25-person team, it survived temperatures from minus 55 to plus 125 degrees Celsius.

Rebuilding it on an FPGA

Alan Taylor, an FPGA and embedded systems engineer, decided the best way to honor that history was to rebuild it. He produced a complete open source recreation of the F-14 CADC on an FPGA, using a Spartan-7 based system-on-module from the Adiuvo Embedded System Tile. His GitHub repository does not just fake the look of the original. It contains synthesizable VHDL for all six of the CADC's chips, plus documentation and testbenches.

That is a serious engineering effort on its own. But Taylor wanted to prove the thing actually worked, not just that it compiled.

So he printed the airplane

The natural test rig for a flight computer is, of course, an airplane. Taylor built a scale 3D printed F-14 Tomcat and wired his FPGA CADC into its articulated swing-wing system. On July 24, 2026, he posted video of the first test, with the wings sweeping exactly as the original flight computer would have commanded.

It is a perfect loop of a project. A secret Cold War chip, rebuilt from scratch in modern hardware description language, validated by printing the very aircraft it was designed to fly. The MP944 camp finally has a working demonstration to wave at the 4004 crowd.

Why this matters beyond nostalgia

Open source silicon recreations like this are more than hobbyist cosplay. They preserve engineering knowledge that was locked behind military secrecy for decades, and they make it teachable. A student can read Taylor's VHDL, run the testbenches, and understand how a 1970 flight computer balanced performance, heat, and reliability under conditions no classroom lab will ever reproduce.

The 3D printed airframe is the cherry on top. It turns an abstract historical claim into something you can watch move. For anyone who prints, it is also a reminder of how far the hobby has come: a desktop machine can now produce the airframe for a demo of a microprocessor that predates almost every computer most of us have touched.

If you want to dig in, Taylor's repository is public and the VHDL is there for the taking. Just do not expect your printed Tomcat to reach Mach 2.