Viewing profile — bunnie

UV doesn't have sufficient penetration depth to cause a lot of trouble for the chip. Of course at some intensity, any kind of light becomes problematic but for any exposure level t…

Just another +1 for fastmail, long time user, really pleased with the service. They do one thing and they do it well, and they charge a fair price for the value delivered.

Actually this chip does have ECC on many of the SRAMs - hence the bit widths of 36 bits instead of 32 in many cases. If it's a concern that the ECC is being used as storage, I'd su…

I've run power for a 100-person theme camp in the past. According to the logs, we burned an average of 36.8 gallons per day, or 1.4 liters/person/day (we ran the generator for 9 da…

Anecdotally, from when I did first amendment activism, my lawyers would always recommend that I stick to doing it with dead tree editions as much as possible. Literal book banning …

The core ID definitely didn't need to be in a register, but the elapsed clocks since reset is actually really handy. Having this in the hot path allows me to build a captouch senso…

Yah, it is - the text is first posted to the campaign, and then copied to my blog for long-term archival in a domain that I control, sans the sales pitch.

It's hard to know for sure, because we don't have access to the PIO's implementation, but I suspect that the PIO is "not small". That being said - size isn't everything. At these s…

I suspect there are tricks to get higher rates, for sure. And hopefully once we see a library of applications forming, we can make informed decisions about what extensions and feat…

USB 12Mbps is one of the envisioned core use cases - the Baochip doesn't have a host USB interface, so being able to emulate a full-speed USB host with a BIO core opens the possibi…

FIFO is 8-deep. I did fail to mention that explicitly in the article, I think. The depth is so automatic to me that I forget other people don't know it. The deadlock possibilities …

Correct, actually most programs I've written for the BIO are in assembly. The C compiler support is a relatively recent addition, mostly to showcase the possibilities of doing high…

If there's a single rising edge on the bus that you can use as quantum trigger, then, the reads turn into as series of moves into a FIFO, and the response can be quite fast. The qu…

It depends a lot upon where the processing is happening. For example, you could do something where all the data is pre-processed and you're just blasting bits into a GPIO register …

As a side note about speed comparisons - please keep in mind the faster speeds cited for the PIO are achieved through overclocking. The BIO should also be able to overclock. It won…

Agreed! The PIO is great at what it does. I drew a lot of inspiration from it.

The idea of the wait-to-quantum register is that it gets you out of cycle-counting hell at the expense of sacrificing a few cycles as rounding errors. But yes, for maximum performa…

Actually, the PIO does what it does very well! There is no "worse" or "better" - just different. Because it does what it does so well, I use the PIO as the design study comparison …

Hello again HN, I'm bunnie! Unfortunately, time zones strike again...I'll check back when I can, and respond to your questions.

To clarify - RISC-V is an architecture, and that is an open specification. However, as an architecture it only specifies things like, what the instructions are and their encodings.…

Hmm...it's not just the speed. Actually, the I/O pads themselves are closed source because there's a lot of process magic in them - from the ring seals to the ESD protection, the f…

thank you~~

I imagine sel4 could be possible, but I haven't done any specific checking for compatibility. Current draw - depends on the operating mode, etc. A dabao board with all its regulato…

It all depends on the node. Masks in 130nm are maybe in the $10k's-$100k's range. Masks for the latest TSMC nodes might cost you $30-40 million per set. The masks are pretty much a…

There's actually a whole space of shared-mask tapeouts. You might have heard of TinyTapeout [1]/LibreLane [2] and the general concept of "MPW" masks - multi-project wafer masks. Th…