Few tweaks left before the final deadline. Then it's off to the fab and we'll see if it works in three months!

Really hope there isn't a bug in the memory loader, otherwise it'll be DOA and not much to do about it. But even so, was a great learning experience!

Chip was written in Spade HDL (spade-lang.org), which transpiles down to SystemVerilog. That's then fed into a LibreLane build process that turns the verilog into transistors. All open source!

Instruction set is pretty standard set of ALU, LSU, comparisons, branching, bit manip, etc. But I snuck in a few fun extras like a pseudorandom number generator, tanh and multiply-and-accumulate to try some light ML inference (rough plan is reservoir computing)

Clock speed is sorta up in the air. Still optimizing, but simulations say it should hit ~20MHz in all "process corners" (i.e. if the fab makes slow transistors and the chip is 125C hot). Probably faster in nominal case but we'll see

I did manage to sneak in two small silicon art logos. Wish I had more time to put more on the chip but oh well!

- Transport-triggered architecture
- ~20Mhz
- Two 32 bit data buses (i.e. two instructions per cycle)
- 1024 double slot instruction memory
- 256 word stack
- 4kb of general RAM
- 80 or so various instruction types
- 16 GPIO, SPI, UART, 8 bit parallel memory loader interface

It really is. 😩

Ooh, didn't know that was a thing, will look into it!

Strapping tensioner/sealer and kraft tape dispenser 😄

Yep!

Yunno I never ended up testing it 😅

Pretty shortly after this I got the OM2a, and then moved shops so it got partially disassembled and stored under a table. And just never got back to it / never had a need for it.

It about tripled the weight, so probably would have helped!

Yep! It's gravel/sand mixed with epoxy (and some urethane because I ran out of epoxy). Added a ton of mass to the CNC frame for better cutting/vibration damping.

Who could have foreseen this?!

If only there had been some kind of temporary appropriation - let's call it a continuing resolution - that could have been used as a wedge. 🤔

Should probably call your senator Chuck to chat with them about this unfortunate circumstance!