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Comment by jholman | Hacker News Reader

You're making a category error, I think. This books/course doesn't cover physics. It doesn't even cover signal stuff, like stuff about how fast the voltage levels stabilize, or even voltages at all.

It's not "silicon wafer to Tetris" or "pile of protons and neutrons to Tetris" or "transistors to Tetris". You start with nand gates (and later also you get flipflops for free).

This course would work equally well on nand gates made of carved wooden gears, or nand gates made with fluidic logic, or nand gates made by encoding the whole thing into O-gauge hobby railroads.

If that's the level of explanation you seek, this book is incredible.

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I vaguely remember someone trying to go the other direction, and teach "Tetris to Quake" but I can't find substantiation that course ever existed, and might have confused it with this article:

http://archive.gamedev.net/archive/reference/articles/articl...

I'd also be interested in anything that extends the stack from where nand2tetris left off, because, while I loved it[1], it felt unsatisfying that can't actually compile to usable binaries for the hardware -- your executable can't usually fit in memory and it doesn't teach you how swapping (or whatever) would get you to that point. It also doesn't cover more common hardware/OS issues like interrupts, or having juggle multiple running programs.

[1] most interesting technical project I've ever completed, with the possible exception of Microcorruption.com.

A “silicon to nand gate” would be a sweet complimentary course. However, probably more difficult to make hands on.

Followed by a prequel "Sand to ingot"

> It's not "silicon wafer to Tetris"...

That is a good point, I had just assumed that information was available somewhere online, but it doesn't seem likely.

Lower-level teaching resources definitely exist! Here are my favorites:

- The Zero to ASIC course (and Tiny Tapeout) [1] explains transistor circuits and teaches you an open source software stack---and you get a chip physically manufactured! You could make the Nand to Tetris computer in actual silicon (if you can get enough transistors).

- To learn how things are manufactured on silicon wafers, get textbooks on microfabrication. A decent starting point is [2]. There's also a good video series [3] for a quick overview.

- To understand how a single transistor or diode works, get textbooks on "semiconductor devices". A good starting point is the free online [4].

[1] https://www.zerotoasiccourse.com/ https://tinytapeout.com/

[2] "Introduction to Microelectronic Fabrication" by Jaeger

[3] https://siliconrun.com/our-films/silicon-run-1/

[4] "Modern Semiconductor Devices for Integrated Circuits" by Chenming Hu, https://www.chu.berkeley.edu/modern-semiconductor-devices-fo...

Thanks for the links, but notably there's a large gap between 'a single transistor or diode' and even the simplest real world microchip, such as the SN7400.

Everything before that stage, down to mining ore out of the ground, is understandable.

And everything after that stage is also understandable, at least to the level of an Intel 386 processor.

The gap is what I believe there are no resources online.

Something like this will at least get you conversant. You only need the first few chapters, and can skip BJTs.

https://archive.org/details/microelectronicc00jaeg/page/n11/...

https://nandgame.com/ has a cmos level towards the end. It doesn’t explain the transistor-level physics but does let you play with things.

The art of electronics book might be a good place to start if you want to learn the physical/electrical layer.

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