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by hwpythonner 415 days ago
Just running on FPGA at the moment.

This is still an early-stage project — it's not completed yet, and fabricating a custom chip would involve huge costs.

I'm a solo developer worked on this in my spare time, so FPGA was the most practical way to prove the core concepts and validate the architecture.

Longer term, I definitely see ASIC fabrication as the way to unlock PyXL’s full potential — but only once the use case is clear and the design is a little more mature.

4 comments

Oh, my comment wasn't meant as a criticism just curiosity because I would have been extremely surprised to see such a project being fabricated.

I find the idea of a processor designed for a specific very high level language quite interesting. What made you choose python and do you think it's the "correct" language for such a project? It sure seems convenient as a language but I wouldn't have thought it is best suited for that task due to the very dynamic nature of it. Perhaps something like Nim which is similar but a little less dynamic would be a better choice?

Could be a candidate for Tiny Tapeout in the future.

https://tinytapeout.com

Im not super versed in hardware, but whats the reason you can't adapt this to run on an ARM microprocessor chip? Why go with FPGA?

Like if I could buy a Cortex board and write Python, hit compile, and have the thing run, this would be INSANELY useful to me, cause cortex chips have pretty great A/D converters for sensing.

there are several free asic shuttle runs available for hobbyists iirc