Tiny New Chips Win ChipCenter Award

phi1o writes "Ever wonder why a burrito-sized pentium is also called a "micro" chip? Me too... This page @ ChipCenter shows a new line of chips from National Semiconducter that are *really* small. They're all analog and of course nowhere near as complex as a P3, but you gotta wonder if processors are headed down this road in the future, to where they are mostly silicon rather than ceramic and plastic. On the one hand, this will make for smaller devices. On the other, it's gonna make building anything without a giant factory (ie in your bedroom.... hardware geeks with me?) much more difficult. I don't know what to think. "

Comments

Good advice here.

[pb]

"Whatever else you are told to believe,
do not accept that size is unimportant"

Yeah, we hear *that* one all the time. So what are you saying?
Oh, smaller is *better*? Yeah, those nerds use *that* excuse all the time.

Any female slashdot readers out there want to confirm or deny these
accusations? And what about that bit with the standard mounting process,
do you liberated women agree with that too? And... hey, is this segfault?

---
pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.

Hardware hacking was gone in the 286 days.

[mr]

The Garage/bedroom hardware hacker is, for the most part, dead.

There WAS a time when you visited 3M's surplus, bought dead boards by the pound, desoldered the chips and tested the gates individually.

Then you built your own machine.

As we moved from MSI to VLSI (and beyond), the hardware hacking oppertunities have become the thing you do if you have a simple project (and you can reduce them to a PAL or perhaps a FPGA).

Because the OLD method was:
Design on paper
Build the prototype
Look for errors
put the logic scope on to find the errors
loop to build prototype till fixed.
(Anyone wanna buy a CP/M based logic analyzer prototype? one of 10 in the world)

The *NEW* method is
Design on computer in test environment
Test on computer
Build on silicon
Do a bit of testing (cuz it should work on the 1st time)
Ship.


*IF* you are looking to be a Hacker:
Software hacker - get machines thrown out in dumpster, and old software you beg, borrow, or GPLed $0
Hardware hacker - newer machine, DSP or FPGAs, prototyping boards, software (hard to have GPLed tools here) - $5000-$25000-How deep are your pockets...

Being a bedroom/garage hardware hacker is no longer cheap, and based on simple tools, like it used to be.

Software hacking is the last low-cost (Bedroom/garage) hacking frontier. You may not be as productive with cc and make as you are in an intergrated environment, but tools are only part of hacking..the grey matter you have to manuplate the tools matter most.