Collaborate Disseminate
The list of requirements for hosting one of our weekly Hack Chats is pretty short: you’ve got to be knowledgeable, passionate, and above all else, willing to put those two …read more Continue reading Al Williams Tells All in the Logic Simulation Hack Chat
What would you make if you were given about ten square millimeters of space on a silicon wafer on a 130 nm process? That’s the exact question that the Open …read more Continue reading Remoticon 2021 // Matt Venn Helps You Make ASICS
They say time is money, but if that’s true, money must also be time. It’s all figurative, of course, but in the case of this NTP server heater powered by …read more Continue reading Bitcoin Mining ASICs Repurposed to Keep NTP Server on Track
VHDL and Verilog are hardware description languages, used to describe and define logic circuits. They’re typically used to design ASICs and to program FPGAs, essentially using software to define hardware. …read more Continue reading Using VHDL To Generate Discrete Logic PCB Designs
Designing your own integrated circuits as a one-person operation from your home workshop sounds like science fiction. But 20 years ago, so did rolling your own circuit boards to host a 600 MHz microcontroller with firmware you wrote yourself. Turns out silicon design isn’t nearly as out of reach as …read more
Continue reading Remoticon Video: From Zero to ASIC; How to Design in Silicon
For anyone serious about mining cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin, we’re well past the point where a standard desktop computer is of much use. While an array of high-end GPUs is still viable for some currencies, the real heavy hitters are using custom mining hardware that makes use of application-specific integrated …read more
Continue reading Hacking the FPGA Control Board from a Bitcoin Miner
[Jean-Francois Debroux] spent 35 years designing analog ASICs. He’s started a book and while it isn’t finished — indeed he says it may never be — the 180 pages he posted on LinkedIn are a pretty good read.
The 46 sections are well organized, although some are placeholders. There are …read more
You might have caught Maya Posch’s article about the first open-source ASIC tools from Google and SkyWater Technology. It envisions increased access to make custom chips — Application Specific Integrated Circuits — designed using open-source tools, and made real through existing chip fabrication facilities. My first thought? How much does …read more
Continue reading Your Own Open Source ASIC: SkyWater-PDF Plans First 130 nm Wafer in 2020
A process design kit (PDK) is a by now fairly standard part of any transformation of a new chip design into silicon. A PDK describes how a design maps to a foundry’s tools, which itself are described by a DRM, or design rule manual. The FOSSi foundation now reports on …read more
Continue reading Creating A Custom ASIC With The First Open Source PDK
Typically when we select a project for “Fail to the Week” honors, it’s because something went wrong with the technology of the project. But the tech of [Leo Fernekes]’ innovative LED sign system was never the problem; it was the realities of scaling up to production as well as the …read more
Continue reading Fail of the Week: Bright Idea for LED Signs Goes Bad