Chip Ignite: Rapid IC Creation | Hacker News Reader

Chip Ignite: Rapid IC Creation

efabless.com

24 pointskumarski8 comments

Oh man how this makes me want to make the jump from normal electronics design into doing a chip.

They might not allow it (no chance of marketplace sales or follow-on volume), but if I were better off I'd drop the $10k or so and do something random just for the experience. Maybe a bunch of different little designs on one IC.

If you don't mind publishing your project as open source then there is the option to let Google pay for it:

https://efabless.com/open_shuttle_program/2

There are 40 slots, so you might not get selected. But the open shuttle uses the same software and framework as chip ignite.

I've had a chip design bouncing around in my head since the 1980s, now I can finally get it made. Thanks so much for posting this.

The idea is simple... a grid of 4x4 LUTs, each geographic neighbor has 1 bit in, and 1 bit out, there are 16 states, each with 4 outputs.

Turns out that this route-less FPGA can do some fairly amazing things, at least in theory. Now I intend to find out.

The really old blog I had about it - https://bitgrid.blogspot.com/

There have been FPGAs in the past which used the logic blocks for routing, including the Xilinx 6200. I think that was also the case for the Atmel AT40K FPGAs, but could be remembering wrong.

In fact, our project for the previous Google shuttle was an FPGA-like device which also routes data using logic cells. Here is an introduction to the idea:

https://github.com/fiberhood/MorphleLogic/blob/main/README_M...

It worked in simulation and the chip is currently scheduled to be shipped to us on September 6. There were 2 or 3 projects that were more conventional FPGAs.

The Morphie blob looks like a special case of a 4x4LUT. I'd be interested to know how the chips work out.

There are some common features, but also differences that makes them a bit hard to compare directly.

An academic project that takes yet another approach to this design space is:

http://cba.mit.edu/projects/rala/

Unfortunately, none of the links there go to anything, unless you have a username/password to sign in.

Here is a link to an "open access" copy of the 2010 RALA paper:

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/72349

Reply on news.ycombinator.com