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

[Derek B. Noonburg]

On Sat, 10 Dec 2022 00:28:54 -0800, "Brian E. Lavender"
<brian at brie.com> wrote:

> 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."

Yup.  From what I've read, I think the open source design tools have
gotten good enough that you can some pretty interesting FPGA work
entirely with free software on Linux.  (I haven't actually done any of
this myself.  Yet.)

> Do you guys do any System Verilog? 

Nope.  I did a little bit of Verilog (and VHDL) a bunch of years ago.
I'd need to re-learn it almost from scratch.  I've never touched System
Verilog.

- Derek