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From ASCII to ASIC: Porting donut.c to a tiny slice of silicon

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Re: From ASCII to ASIC: Porting donut.c to a tiny slice of silicon

#21

Post by rcxdude »

malux85 wrote: post #3

The thing about donut.c is that its source code is shaped like a donut, that’s a huge part of its charm. While altering it to use shifts and adds is a fun exercise, since its source code is no longer shaped like the donut it renders, I would argue that a large part of its charm has disappeared and it’s no longer a donut.c

Indeed. I feel like to capture the spirit of it you could make the layout on the chip look like a donut, which would be if anything more of a challenge than the layout of the source code.

Re: From ASCII to ASIC: Porting donut.c to a tiny slice of silicon

#24

Post by tmaly »

Taniwha wrote: post #15
swores wrote: post #6

Going slightly off topic, I was interested to learn from this blog about Tiny Tapeout, the service they've used to order their custom chip design. The concept for anyone as unfamiliar with it as me is that lots of people pay a few hundred dollars each to get a small part of a chip being made, and once it's made they receive the chip ready to use with their section everyone else's, too, with a way to choose which bit…

Almost anything you can do on Tiny Tapeout your can do on an FPGA and test it today (not wait 6-9 months to get silicon back) - if you are laying polygons yourself because you want to test out some novel circuit that TT is potentially a great idea. On the other hand if you've learned logic design and want to spread your wings and make some real chips then TT is an educational experience - not only is the tooling diff…

I have not programmed an FPGA in 26 years.

What do you recommend for a FPGA brand today?

Re: From ASCII to ASIC: Porting donut.c to a tiny slice of silicon

#25

Post by mystified5016 »

swores wrote: post #6

Going slightly off topic, I was interested to learn from this blog about Tiny Tapeout, the service they've used to order their custom chip design. The concept for anyone as unfamiliar with it as me is that lots of people pay a few hundred dollars each to get a small part of a chip being made, and once it's made they receive the chip ready to use with their section everyone else's, too, with a way to choose which bit…

Pretty much exclusively educational.

Iirc you pay a large amount for each chip, you only get a couple, and I seem to remember some clause about giving the chip back or something.

The project has some pretty draconian rules, but it seems to be all done with good intent: to make it impossible for corporations to abuse this for cheap ASICS while allowing actual hobbyists to get a foot in the door.

TinyTapeout is NOT for making a custom run of ASICS for your widget, it's the only plausible way for a hobbyist to spin up a single chip design just to see how it's done.

Re: From ASCII to ASIC: Porting donut.c to a tiny slice of silicon

#26

Post by Taniwha »

tmaly wrote: post #24
Taniwha wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost anything you can do on Tiny Tapeout your can do on an FPGA and test it today (not wait 6-9 months to get silicon back) - if you are laying polygons yourself because you want to test out some novel circuit that TT is potentially a great idea. On the other hand if you've learned logic design and want to spread your wings and make some real chips then TT is an educational experience - not only is the tooling diff…

I have not programmed an FPGA in 26 years. What do you recommend for a FPGA brand today?

Xilinx, Altera - there's also some really cheap stuff coming out of China (Tang Nano). Because they all have their own dev system you tend to choose the one you know

There's a standard for external add-ons called PMODs (small boards with external connectors or parts) tiny tapeout uses it too, picking a dev board with PMOD connectors is probably a good idea.

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