Hand-made Web Server, Built From 200 TTL Chips

ps writes "Bill Buzbee has constructed a hand-made CPU, complete with hardware address translation, memory mapped I/O, and DMA, out of 200 74-series TTL chips wired together with thousands of individually wrapped wires. By using a port of Adam Dunkels' uIP TCP/IP stack to the Magic-1, it currently serves up live web pages at an amazing speed of 3 MHz. See the website for photos and schematics."

Comments

Re:Homebrew CPUs

[crgrace]

So, if a guy wanted to build a more "modern" homebrew CPU, what options are there? Are there any decent CAD tools that don't cost a thousand million dollars? And once a layout is done, is there anywhere you can get just one single chip made for a reasonable price?

LesPaul,

I built a CPU using freeware tools as part of my PhD project. The paper is "A 12-bit 80MS/s Pipelined ADC with Bootstrapped Digital Calibration" published in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, May 2005. You can google the title if you want to see the paper. Anyway, I designed a 24-bit microprogramed CPU in 0.25um CMOS to act as the calibration controller of the Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC). The project was great because I got to design the architecutre of the CPU, the microcode/instruction set, I wrote a custom assembler, etc. I designed the circuits using viewdraw (public domain UNIX schematic capture tool). I designed the logic and tested the circuits using a public domain VHDL simulator (can't remember which one.. alliance maybe?). I laid out the circuit using Magic, a public domain layout editor running on Unix or Linux. The only thing that cost money was fabricating the chip. There is a service called MOSIS (www.mosis.org) that will do multi-project runs to lower the cost for you. I think the cheapest you will get is a couple of thousand bucks for 40 parts or so. Mine was something like $40k but I had high performance analog circuits in a fancy process. Email me if you need more info at carl.grace@yahoo.com

Cheers,
Carl