Necklaces aren’t often very high-tech, mostly because of the abuse they have to go through being worn. This was obviously a problem that needed solving, so [Matt Venn] decided to change that by making a necklace out of ASICs just in time for Supercon.
Although this isn’t the first time [Matt] made such a necklace, he though his previous one was “too hip-hop” and not enough “15 million dollar Nikon Lithography Stepper”. Obviously, this means designing the whole chain, art included, from scratch with the blinkenlights to match. Together with [Pat Deegan] and [Adam Zeloof], the team created a beautiful technopunk necklace with art on every chain link and of course a real silicon wafer with a RISC-V tapeout from 2022 on it.
With [Adam] doing modeling for the chain links, and [Pat] and [Matt] designing the electronics required for the mandatory blinkenlights, and some last-minute soldering and assembling the project was finished just in time for Supercon, where it fit right in with all the other blinkenlights. It even runs on one of the RISC-V cores from the same tapeout as the central wafer!
THis takeme back to the late 60s, when LEDs were new and started bcoeming available at reasonable prices. Companies produced pendants with blinking LEDs…and they looked really exotic at the time.
Mid 1990 when blue LED were just becoming available. I bough the first blue LED for $2, a bit pricey when you could still get assorted 20 LED pack from Radio Shack for the same price but blue!! It was among the earliest low price commercially produced LED.
My computer was the first and for a few years, the only one with blue power LED. :D Many jealous people around had to wait a while to get some.
Thanks for the write-up! Minor correction: The pendant wafer is from 1990. All my chips are from wafers that are 200mm. I was tempted… Maybe next con!
Good, I was going to leave a comment to the effect of: The most astonishing thing about this is a 4-inch fab running in 2022.
lol that chain and cap, great photo!