[swores]

Going slightly off topic, I was interested to learn from this blog about Tiny Tapeout, the service they've used to order their custom chip design. The concept for anyone as unfamiliar with it as me is that lots of people pay a few hundred dollars each to get a small part of a chip being made, and once it's made they receive the chip ready to use with their section everyone else's, too, with a way to choose which bit gets run.

I know basically nothing about chip design, and I'm wondering if anyone could tell me: is this only useful for education purposes, for example learning how to make a chip that creates a donut on a screen, or are there people using Tiny Tapeout for useful projects, too?

For each of their chip runs, they publish a list of the different people's projects that got included - https://tinytapeout.com/runs/ - but it's not easy to spot which ones might be more than somebody just learning how to play with chip design.

Essentially, if someone were to pick this up as a hobby, what is the most interesting thing they could make using this?

[Taniwha]

Almost anything you can do on Tiny Tapeout your can do on an FPGA and test it today (not wait 6-9 months to get silicon back) - if you are laying polygons yourself because you want to test out some novel circuit that TT is potentially a great idea.

On the other hand if you've learned logic design and want to spread your wings and make some real chips then TT is an educational experience - not only is the tooling different but often you need to understand stuff in depth that FPGA tooling kind of hides (because essentially FPGAs come pre routed) so it's a great way to take a small step into silicon design.

There's probably a large bunch of people who will make just one design because they can, just to say they did it.

I've taped out 4 CPUs on TT, I'm retired, I used to do chip design, TT has the same sort of scope as the logic blocks I was making 20 years ago - no one is going to be using it for manufacturing (you get just 1 die back)

[tmaly]

I have not programmed an FPGA in 26 years.

What do you recommend for a FPGA brand today?

[Taniwha]

Xilinx, Altera - there's also some really cheap stuff coming out of China (Tang Nano). Because they all have their own dev system you tend to choose the one you know

There's a standard for external add-ons called PMODs (small boards with external connectors or parts) tiny tapeout uses it too, picking a dev board with PMOD connectors is probably a good idea.

[sircastor]

I got a tile on TinyTapeout9 (I think) and participated in a workshop for it at the Hackaday Supercon last November.

I had a lot of fun. I had a bit of knowledge from my university digital logic class, but really enjoyed learning how the layers are put down and how they make transistors. If you have an opportunity to do it, I strongly recommend it.

There are some very cool things you can do, but you’re limited by the tile size, the inputs provided and it’s worth noting that you get one chip on a module. It’s probably the 2nd step in getting started making a custom ASIC if you wanted to get into that. (The first being learning how to design with logic gates)

bitlui made a VGA Rickroll with it a while ago. [1]

My tile spells out “Aaron” (my first name) on the output to the seven segment display.

I think there is enough room to make a simple microprocessor. Fun if you’ve not ever done something like it.

So, to answer your question - yes it could be useful if you had a very specific thing you wanted to do that made sense in silicon. You could buy extra tiles and get space. That said, it’s mostly educational. But worth it if you have an interest.

[1] https://youtu.be/DdF_nzMW_i8

[mystified5016]

Pretty much exclusively educational.

Iirc you pay a large amount for each chip, you only get a couple, and I seem to remember some clause about giving the chip back or something.

The project has some pretty draconian rules, but it seems to be all done with good intent: to make it impossible for corporations to abuse this for cheap ASICS while allowing actual hobbyists to get a foot in the door.

TinyTapeout is NOT for making a custom run of ASICS for your widget, it's the only plausible way for a hobbyist to spin up a single chip design just to see how it's done.