When hackers found and developed ways to order PCBs on the cheap, it revolutionized the way we create. Accessible 3D printing brought us entire new areas to create things. [Matt Venn] is one of the people at the forefront of hackers designing our own silicon, and we’ve covered plenty of his research over the years. His latest effort to involve the hacker community, TinyTapeout, makes chip design accessible to newcomers – the bar is as low as arranging logic gates on a web browser page.
For this, [Matt] worked with people like [Uri Shaked] of Wokwi fame, [Sylvain “tnt” Munaut], [jix], and a few others. Together, they created all the tooling necessary, and most importantly, a pipeline where your logic gate-based design in Wokwi gets compiled into a block ready to be put into silicon, with even simulations and compile-time verification for common mistakes. As a result, the design process is remarkably straightforward, to the point where a 9-year-old kid can do it. If you wanted, you could submit your Verilog, too!
The first round of TinyTapeout had a deadline in the first days of September and brought 152 entries together – just in time for an Efabless shuttle submission. All of these designs were put on a single instance of a chip, that will be fabbed in quantity, tested, soldered onto breakouts, and mailed out to individual participants. In this way, everyone will be getting everyone’s design, but thanks to the on-chip muxing hardware, they’re able to switch between designs using on-breakout DIP switches.
More after the break…
[Rob] has been focusing on day-to-day usability first and foremost, with pleasantly clicky encoders, impeccable performance of its watch duty, unparalleled expandability, and comfortable wrist fit — it provides a feeling no commercial wearable could bring.
