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Design Your Very Own Microprocessor

Posted by chrisd on from the gated-community dept.

LightJockey writes: "CircuitCellar has a great article on designing and building your own microprocessor using FPGAs and openly available processor designs, ranging from ARM and MIPS based to custom designs, and even a couple SPARC based chips, and also a really cool 'processor toaster,' start with a base processor design, and using a webpage to select upgraded components, it spits out the VHDL file you need to create it. Brings garage hackerdom up to a whole new level!"

3 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. /.ed allready by Kizzle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Since most articles are /.ed as soon as they are posted. I think a great feature for subscribers would be a mirror to each article that is hosted on slashdot.

    --
    Hacker Media
  2. Re:Amateur chip designers by mrm677 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Designing a modern microprocessor can not be done by amateurs or a group of people with a B.S. degrees in electrical engineering. Sure, many of us have taken undergraduate architecture classes and maybe have designed a simple pipelined microprocessor in Mentor Graphics or VHDL/Verilog. Some of us maybe even implemented it with FPGAs.

    However, anything close to being as complex as Intel/AMD chips requires an army of highly experienced architects/engineers with many of them having pHD's. Even the software design tools, such as Mentor, cost well over $100,000

    Then building the chip is another beast requiring a fab facility in the order of $1 billion for any process with feature sizes smaller than 0.5.

    Microprocessors are becoming so complex to design and build, that only a few companies are surviving. Sort of like the aircraft industry. There are only 2 remaining companies in this world that design and build 300+ passenger commercial aircraft (Boeing and Airbus). It is infeasible for a new competitor to arise because of the capital involved (unless of course it is nationally sponsored).

  3. Re:Amateur chip designers by Bobzibub · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Replace
    'Microprocessor' with 'Operating System'
    'Intel' with 'Microsoft'
    'AMD' with 'Sun'
    ....
    Read the above comment again. ; )


    Building a chip in a fab would have to be a traditional commercial endevour. Agreed. Aren't Boeing and Airbus the only two airline manufacturers because they are subsidized and therefore others cannot compete? Cheers!