16 bits of exponent for the longest-format real number, with a stack architecture CPU and eight 80-bit stack registers, with a computationally rich instruction set. The design solved a few outstanding known problems in numerical computing and numerical software: rounding-error problems were eliminated for 64-bit operands, and numerical mode conversions were solved for all 64-bit numbers. Palmer credited William Kahan's writings on floating point as a significant influence on their design. The 8087 design initially met a cool reception in Santa Clara due to its aggressive design. Eventually, the design was assigned to Intel Israel, and Rafi Nave was assigned to lead the implementation of the chip. Palmer, Ravenel and Nave were awarded patents for the design. Robert Koehler and John Bayliss were also awarded a patent for the technique where some instructions with a particular bit pattern were offloaded to the coprocessor. The 8087 had 45,000 transistors and was manufactured as a 3 μm depletion-load HMOS circuit. It worked in tandem with the 8086 or 8088 and introduced about 60 new instructions. Most 8087 assembly mnemonics begin with F, such as FADD, FMUL, FCOM and so on, making them easily distinguishable from 8086 instructions. The binary encodings for all 8087 instructions begin with the bit pattern 11011, decimal 27, the same as the ASCII character ESC, although in the higher-order bits of a byte; similar instruction prefixes are also sometimes referred to as "escape codes". The instruction mnemonic assigned by Intel for these coprocessor instructions is "ESC". When the 8086 or 8088 CPU executed the ESC instruction, if the second byte (the ModR/M byte) specified a memory operand, the CPU would execute a bus cycle to read one word from the memory location specified in the instruction (using any 8086 addressing mode), but it would not store the read operand into any CPU register or perform any operation on it; the 8087 would observe the bus and decode the instruction stream in sync with the 8086, recognizing the coprocessor instructions meant for itself. For an 8087 instruction with a memory operand, if the instruction called for the operand to be read, the 8087 would take the word of data read by the main CPU from the data bus. If the operand to be read was longer than one word, the 8087 would also copy the address from the address bus; then, after completion of the data read cycle driven