I know basically nothing about chip design, and I'm wondering if anyone could tell me: is this only useful for education purposes, for example learning how to make a chip that creates a donut on a screen, or are there people using Tiny Tapeout for useful projects, too?
For each of their chip runs, they publish a list of the different people's projects that got included - https://tinytapeout.com/runs/ - but it's not easy to spot which ones might be more than somebody just learning how to play with chip design.
Essentially, if someone were to pick this up as a hobby, what is the most interesting thing they could make using this?
On the other hand if you've learned logic design and want to spread your wings and make some real chips then TT is an educational experience - not only is the tooling different but often you need to understand stuff in depth that FPGA tooling kind of hides (because essentially FPGAs come pre routed) so it's a great way to take a small step into silicon design.
There's probably a large bunch of people who will make just one design because they can, just to say they did it.
I've taped out 4 CPUs on TT, I'm retired, I used to do chip design, TT has the same sort of scope as the logic blocks I was making 20 years ago - no one is going to be using it for manufacturing (you get just 1 die back)
What do you recommend for a FPGA brand today?
I had a lot of fun. I had a bit of knowledge from my university digital logic class, but really enjoyed learning how the layers are put down and how they make transistors. If you have an opportunity to do it, I strongly recommend it.
There are some very cool things you can do, but you’re limited by the tile size, the inputs provided and it’s worth noting that you get one chip on a module. It’s probably the 2nd step in getting started making a custom ASIC if you wanted to get into that. (The first being learning how to design with logic gates)
bitlui made a VGA Rickroll with it a while ago. [1]
My tile spells out “Aaron” (my first name) on the output to the seven segment display.
I think there is enough room to make a simple microprocessor. Fun if you’ve not ever done something like it.
So, to answer your question - yes it could be useful if you had a very specific thing you wanted to do that made sense in silicon. You could buy extra tiles and get space. That said, it’s mostly educational. But worth it if you have an interest.
Iirc you pay a large amount for each chip, you only get a couple, and I seem to remember some clause about giving the chip back or something.
The project has some pretty draconian rules, but it seems to be all done with good intent: to make it impossible for corporations to abuse this for cheap ASICS while allowing actual hobbyists to get a foot in the door.
TinyTapeout is NOT for making a custom run of ASICS for your widget, it's the only plausible way for a hobbyist to spin up a single chip design just to see how it's done.
While altering it to use shifts and adds is a fun exercise, since its source code is no longer shaped like the donut it renders, I would argue that a large part of its charm has disappeared and it’s no longer a donut.c
I know the chips hasn't been delivered yet, but, the statements at the beginning re: we can expect a new frame every N nanoseconds, give me hope there's a rough heuristic for what speedup we'd expect in this particular case.
Do we have a rough* understanding of what the speedup will be?
* Within 2 OOMs
Finding a somewhat comparable CPU would be challenging. It would need to run at around 48 MHz and have 16 bit integer addition. I think the fastest Z80 clone would be a candidate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_eZ80), but that’s a pipelined CPU. You may find that unfair.
If you don’t pick something comparable but just something cheap, given the 48MHz clock of this hardware and the limited amount of parallelism, it wouldn’t surprise me if the typical modern smartphone could do it faster, even without the use of a GPU.
Long time since AI Challenge, I see you're dabbling into hardware too!
It's been fifteen years and we're still waiting. Thanks.
part 3 is to find the secp256k1 private key for satoshi's bitcoins
