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Comment by Rannath | Hacker News Reader

I just want this to be cheap enough so that we can archive and re-create no-longer manufactured chips.

+1. My personal choice: MAX038 (no relation with the 8038), way better than any similar analog wave generators but discontinued long ago and never upgraded.

I know there are cheap DDS chips, but they require filters and control logic. This one goes from 100 KHz to 20MHz with just a bunch of parts. Be careful of those sold online however as they're all fakes; this chip was killed well over a decade ago. I'm not aware of any clones yet, though I would welcome them if on par quality wise with the original.

https://datasheets.maximintegrated.com/en/ds/MAX038.pdf

Interesting chip. It's quite literally almost an entire standard function generator on one chip, with a bandwidth far exceeding some similar chips.

Whether it's actually better than those from the 80s, I'm not sure. Both HP and Philips used to use ASICs -- pretty much just matched diode arrays -- for their sine shaping, and that's about the most critical part in this kind of generator.

A lot of chips from the 70s and early 80s have already been reverse-engineered publicly: http://www.visual6502.org/

This will make that easier. AND we can do it non-destructively. That means we get more, & rarer chips, instead of only the common stuff.

How do you recreate them? On FPGA? Fabricating a chip is not cheap.

Personally I was thinking of being able to recreate some discrete chips with breadboards.

Then again MOSIS has prices down to a few thousand/square millimeter. Since current gen stuff is so much smaller, that's probably <$100 for the more complex chips from the 70s, & 80s.

The best I think we'll get is some Amiga/Commodore build it yourself kits That weren't possible before because of out-of-production chips.

Even software emulation would be nice.

for completely digital an fpga would do the job. Analog chips well that's a different.

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