FPGA-radio VS wokwi-verilog-gds-test

I work at one of the big 3 FPGA companies, so I can give you an idea of where our teams spend most of their time, and you can translate that into a hobbyist project as you will.

1. Video and Broadcast. Lots of things to be done here. New protocols are being introduced every year by IEEE for sending video between systems. Most cutting-edge cameras have some sort of FPGA inside doing niche image processing. You can get a sensor and build yourself your own Camera-on-Chip. It's a fantastic way to lose a year or two (I can attest to that). Some good material on the matter here: https://www.mathworks.com/discovery/fpga-image-processing.ht...

2. Compute Acceleration. This is more data centre-specific. SmartNICs, IPUs and the like. Hard to make a dent unless you want to spend 200k on a DevKit, but you could prototype one on a small scale. Some sort of smart FPGA switch that redirects Ethernet traffic between a bunch of Raspberry Pis dependent on one factor or another. One company that comes to mind is Napatech. They make a bunch of really interesting FPGA servers systems: https://www.napatech.com/products/nt200a02-smartnic-capture/

3. Robotics and Computer Vision. Plenty of low-hanging fruit to be plucked here. A rediculous amount of IO, all needed to work in near realtime. Hardware acceleration kernels on top of open standards like ROS 2. I always point people in the direction of Acceleration Robotics' startup in Barcelona for this. They're epic: https://github.com/ros-acceleration

4. Telecomunications. This is a bit of a dark art area for me, where the RF engineers get involved. From what my colleagues tell me, FPGAs are good for this because any other device doesn't service the massive MIMO antenna arrays besides building custom ASICs, and the rate of innovation in this area means an ASIC made one year is redundant the next. Software-defined radios are the current trend. You could have fun making your own radio using an FPGA: https://github.com/dawsonjon/FPGA-radio

What Tiny Tapeout is doing is amazing. Who would have thought that makers and students could have their own chip design made real for so little money?

The tools look amazing as well. You'll won't design the next Intel CPU on that 130nm process but to think that the Z80 will fit on 0.064 mm2 is just amazing.

It's great that there will still be an alternative to the official chip now that it won't be manufactured any more.

Now I want that gorgeous mauve ceramic package with a gold-plated cover over the chip...

https://twitter.com/l_vanek/status/1783557817133039738/photo...

https://tinytapeout.com/

https://tinytapeout.com/ now lest you purchase additional tiles for $50, each tile supports about 1k digital logic gates.

Next one closes June 1.

https://tinytapeout.com/faq/

You might enjoy this talk from the last Latchup on Wave Pipelining

https://fossi-foundation.org/latch-up/2024#riding-the-wave-b...

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall01/cs597a/w...

Tinytapeout 6 closes in a couple of weeks https://tinytapeout.com not too late to knock out your own chip.

The basic idea is that you buy a chunk of a die, your design's pins get multiplexed to the outside, you pay a bit extra and get a dev board

Chips take time - I taped out my 2 TinyTapeout CPU designs over a year ago, the board arrived a couple of months ago, TT3 is (as I understand) almost in the mail (I have a PDP8 there), and TT4 silicon has just come back (I have a RISCV subset there), TT5 is at the fab, and TT6 tapes out in 2 weeks.

Real silicon works like this, you start on a (big) design, do the creative stuff for a couple of months, for a year you test it to hell, by the time you tapeout you're done with it, then you start on the next design, about the time you're in the middle if doing the fun creative bit the old silicon comes back

The easiest way to try Skywater PDK is through TinyTapeout: https://tinytapeout.com/ -- highly recommended.

If you sign up for TinyTapeout [1], you can design a small digital circuit and have it manufactured on actual silicon for about a 100 dollars. It will be the same as your scenario, where everyone gets a tiny patch on the larger chip. You get the chip at the end.

[1] https://tinytapeout.com/ No affiliation, but participated in an earlier run.

Then move onto things like https://tinytapeout.com/ to get your first silicon fabricated.

That would be really neat, but I haven't seen anyone even make a CMOS imager on SKY130.

https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk

One could make an array of thermopiles, like the hacker that made their own imager out of discrete diodes (digiOBSCURA) . But each pixel would cost $7.

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/excelitas-technol...

One might be able to make an array of thermistors (possibly with active cooling using a peltier) like the diycamera (digiOBSCURA) below. Might be an application of combining many RC oscillators in a tree and recovering the signal with an FFT. I have a gut feeling this is possible, but haven't show it.

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/panasonic-electro...

https://github.com/IdleHandsProject/diycamera (digiOBSCURA)

One could experiment with microbolometers on tinytapeout. https://elicit.org/search?q=cmos+microbolometer

https://tinytapeout.com/