[NBLUG/talk] January 2022 Wired article - "This 22-Year-Old Builds Chips in His Parents’ Garage"

[Brian E. Lavender]

On Fri, Dec 09, 2022 at 02:59:42PM -0800, Derek B. Noonburg wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Dec 2022 10:25:07 -0800
> Brad Morrison <bradmorrison at sonic.net> wrote:
> 
> > This January 2022 Wired magazine article on a university student's 
> > chipmaking adventures out of his parent's garage was pretty
> > interesting. Someone posted the link on Open Source Ecology's 
> > (https://www.opensourceecology.org/ - a very cool
> > project/organization in itself) Workshops Facebook page.
> > 
> > https://www.wired.com/story/22-year-old-builds-chips-parents-garage/
> > 
> > This 22-Year-Old Builds Chips in His Parents’ Garage - Sam Zeloof 
> > combines 1970s-era machines with homemade designs. His creations show 
> > what’s possible for small-scale silicon tinkerers.
> 
> I love the idea of being able to build chips from scratch in my garage.
> It would be really cool to be able to fab a processor -- even 20 or
> 30-year-old tech would get me something I could run Linux on.  (My
> first Linux box was a 486 system in 1995 or so.)
> 
> Looks like the reality of it is that even 30-year-old semiconductor fab
> tech is pretty complicated.  But maybe someday...

I think the following quote sums it up.
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/7042/how-much-does-it-cost-to-have-a-custom-asic-made
"Before anything, it's best to implement as much as possible on an FPGA
 to ensure the logic is correct, etc etc."

Do you guys do any System Verilog? 

Brian
-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture