131–140 of 404 posts
I mean 130nm is 20 year old technology and you can buy general purpose CPUs today which are night and day faster than anything made with 130nm. Allowing you to emulate anything specialized using sofware.
From a hobbyist and preservation perspective, it would be cool if this could be used to produce some form of the Apollo 68080 core to revive the 68k architecture a little bit, and build out the Debian m68k port [0][1]. The last "big" 68k chips were produced in 1995 (that would be a 350nm process?) so this could be hugely improved on 130nm. The 68080 core is currently implemented in FPGAs only and is already the faste…
Are there any Risc-V designs that would plug in to this?
Sounds interesting but what you build as an open source chip? I mean 130nm is 20 year old technology and you can buy general purpose CPUs today which are night and day faster than anything made with 130nm. Allowing you to emulate anything specialized using sofware.
And for gate/line level effects things get slower still. Back when I was doing my master's thesis I was running simulations over the weekend on sequences of 100s of instructions in SPICE.
This is amazing. I think the main reason why open source has taken off is because access to a computer is available to many people, and as cost is negligible, it only required free time and enough dedication + skill to be successful. For hardware though, each compile/edit/run cycle costs money, software often has 5-digit per seat licenses, and thus the number of people with enough resources to pursue this as a hobby…
I believe you're talking about the EDA toolchain. Even though it has a long history of open-source attempts, as pointed out by Tim in his presentation, they are few and far between, and massively underwhelming compared to the thriving open source software community. However, if this initiative takes off, it'll be a big help in creating an open source EDA toolchain community.
The opensource EDA toolchain community is already producing some good stuff, Symbiflow: https://symbiflow.github.io/ is a good example, it's an open source FPGA flow targeting multiple devices. It uses Yosys (http://www.clifford.at/yosys/) as a synthesis tool which is also used by the OpenROAD flow: https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project/OpenROAD-flow which aims to give push-button RTL to GDS (i.e. take you from Verilog, which is one of the main languages used in hardware to the thing you give to the foundry as a design for them to produce).
The Skywater PDK is a great development, which is a key part of a healthy opensource EDA ecosystem though there's plenty of other great developments happening in parallel with it you will note there's some people who are involved in several of these projects they're not all being developed in isolation. The next set of talks on the Skywater PDK include how OpenROAD can be used to target Skywater: https://fossi-foundation.org/dial-up/
With the PDK being open, does anyone know if any kind of NDAs are still required to get a chip fabbed? While free-of-charge fabbing is quite nice, I think being NDA-free is even more important so all work including the tweaks necessary for fabbing can be published, e.g. on GitHub. BTW, it will be nice to try this together with the OpenROAD tools [1]. They have support for Google's PDK on their to-do list (planned for…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happened to freescale/NXP "Coldfire"?
I am really not an expert in 68k but the Coldfire does not appear to be fully compatible with the old 68ks used in old Macs and Amigas, and Googling around it doesn't appear to have had much uptake if any. It's not being made anymore either.
This is amazing. I think the main reason why open source has taken off is because access to a computer is available to many people, and as cost is negligible, it only required free time and enough dedication + skill to be successful. For hardware though, each compile/edit/run cycle costs money, software often has 5-digit per seat licenses, and thus the number of people with enough resources to pursue this as a hobby…
Not only is the software expensive it's often crap. By which I don't mean, oh no it doesn't look nice - crap as in productivity-harming. For example, Altium Designer is probably the most modern (not most powerful although close) PCB suite and yet despite costing thousands a seat it is a slow, clunky, single-threaded (in 2020) program (somehow uses 20% of a 7700k at 4.6GHz with an empty design). Discord also thinks th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't built at the same scale, they're much larger than the final structure and lenses are used to scale the image down to the desired size. Here's a video form Intel on how they are made: https://youtu.be/u3ws0UebnSE Apparently they use "electron beams", not sure what those are, they sound similar to lasers but with electrons, from this video: https://youtu.be/PWV9pvdRBNY
Wouldn't that just be something like CRT? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode-ray_tube
From a hobbyist and preservation perspective, it would be cool if this could be used to produce some form of the Apollo 68080 core to revive the 68k architecture a little bit, and build out the Debian m68k port [0][1]. The last "big" 68k chips were produced in 1995 (that would be a 350nm process?) so this could be hugely improved on 130nm. The 68080 core is currently implemented in FPGAs only and is already the faste…
What happened to freescale/NXP "Coldfire"?