Collaborate Disseminate
The odds are that if you’ve heard about application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) at all, it’s in the context of cryptocurrency mining. For some currencies, the only way to efficiently mine …read more Continue reading Opening Up ASIC Design
We might be amidst a chip shortage, but if you enjoy reverse-engineering, there’s never a shortage of intriguing old chips to dig into – and the 2513N 5×7 character ROM …read more Continue reading Factory Defect IC Revived With Sandpaper And Microsoldering
It’s a problem that few of us will likely ever face: once you’ve built your first homemade integrated circuit, what do you do next? If you’re [Sam Zeloof], the answer …read more Continue reading Garage Semiconductor Fab Gets Reactive-Ion Etching Upgrade
It’s no secret that the work of [Ken Sherriff] graces the front pages of Hackaday quite frequently. He’s back again, this time reverse engineering a comparator chip from a photo …read more Continue reading [Ken Sherriff] Picks Apart Mystery Chip from Twitter Photo
Join us on Wednesday, March 10 at noon Pacific for the Decapping Components Hack Chat with John McMaster!
We treat them like black boxes, which they oftentimes are, but what lies beneath the inscrutable packages of electronic components is another …read more
Continue reading Decapping Components Hack Chat with John McMaster
If development platforms were people, Google would be one of the most prolific serial killers in history. Android Things, Google’s attempt at an OS for IoT devices, will officially start shutting down on January 5, 2021, and the plug will be pulled for good a year later. Android Things, which …read more
If you’ve ever handled a chip with a really strange or highly inconvenient pinout and suspected that the reason had something to do with the inner workings, you may be interested to see [electronupdate]’s analysis of why the 4017 Decade Counter IC has such a weirdly nonintuitive pinout. It peeks …read more
We get it, press releases are full of hyperbole. Cerebras recently announced they’ve built the largest chip ever. The chip has 400,000 cores and contains 1.2 trillion transistors on a die over 46,000 square mm in area. That’s roughly the same as a square about 8.5 inches on each side. …read more
Continue reading Largest Chip Ever Holds 1.2 Trillion Transistors
Join us on Wednesday, August 14th at noon Pacific for the Homemade Integrated Circuits Hack Chat with Sam Zeloof!
While most of us are content to buy the chips we need to build our projects, there’s a small group of hackers more interested in making the chips themselves. What it
For years I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around how silicon chips actually work. How does a purposefully contaminated shard of glass wield control over electrons? Every once in a while, someone comes up with a learning aid that makes these abstract concepts really easy to understand, and this …read more
Continue reading Integrated Circuits Can Be Easy to Understand with the Right Teachers