A High-Speed Logic Gate Board For The Easy-Phi Project

A (long) while ago I presented you the Easy-phi project, which aims at building a simple, cheap but intelligent rack-based open hardware/software platform for hobbyists. With this project, you simply have a rack to which you add cards (like the one shown above) that perform the functions you want.

During these last months my team has been finishing the design and production of several different boards so I’ll start showing them off during these next weeks. Today I present you the High Speed Logic Gate Board, a quantum-physicist requested easy-phi module that can perform logic AND/OR functions at <2GHz speeds. This quite technical write-up is mainly about the constraints that high-speed signals pose for schematics design but is also about the techniques that are used for HS signals termination and monitoring. I hope, however, it’ll give our readers a nice overview of what the insides of a high-speed system may look like. All the files used for this board may be found on the official GitHub repository.

16 thoughts on “A High-Speed Logic Gate Board For The Easy-Phi Project

      1. I guess you’re French, and somehow the French don’t pronounce the “h” – the rest of the world does ;) (well, at least the English speaking world..) Maybe now you understand the ‘rule’.

          1. I’m with Jason, Mathieu gets a complete grammatical pass on this, based on his phonetic base. Style would lean towards a more neutral treatment in print as opposed to the spoken word, but then style is not a hard and fast rule.

  1. I’m not sure about the RF considerations of the design when it comes to the 2 GHz spec (looks like others are picking this up too), but the visual nature of the design is gorgeous. A commenter on the linked article voiced this better than I, but with a few design considerations (a solid groundplane layer, multiple decoupling points at optimized capacitance values, etc…), this could be a reasonably robust board for anything a hobbyist could throw at it. I hope this form factor continues to develop… it’s great to see something of such a professional nature begin to make it down to the hobbyist levels that I and many others find ourselves operating within!

  2. “logic AND/OR functions at ” less than* “2GHz speeds”

    Pfff… Anybody can do that. “Shall I have rum and coke, or rum and rum?” See, sub-2GHz and/or function. Boom.

    * Sorry, don’t wanna mess with trying to figure out how to squeeze html entities through the commenting system. HaD needs a preview button. And some rum. ‘Cause the answer to the above is, naturally, “rum and rum”.

    rum rum rum, rum da da, rum rum rum…

Leave a Reply to RobCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.