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Google is offering to produce free chips for you. They have to be open source, they are using 20 year old technology and you'll get 100 of them. Could someone reverse engineer a SID-chip and have Goggle start to crank those suckers out?
https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/03/open_chip_hardware/
https://fossi-foundation.org/2020/06/30/skywater-pdk
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Google Will Fab Your Chips for Free
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:18AM (3 children)
Perhaps I should have written a better summary and not just cobbled a few sentences together and add a few links. I guess I expected a bit more editing or editorializing. My bad.
While the SID part would be lovely I doubt that will happen. As far as I know those things are gone and would have to be recreated. The attempts to do so have been a bit so and so, ok but not quite like the real thing. There are replacements that work "ok", or good enough for the most part.
But overall I was thinking that this might be or could be a nice way to recreate old chips from old machines that are not around anymore, or are really hard to get at -- the SID was just an example really. Leaving Google with the bill for it, or at least allow them to use their McDuck like vault of money to do something good and interesting.
That said I don't think this is yet another Goggle being evil scheme. After all someone that has something secret on a chip wont cheap out and have Goggle make 100 of them for free while at the same time require the entire thing to go open source and be uploaded to Github so that anyone after that can make even more of them. I really don't think they'll add secret backdoors to them either.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:37AM
Even if they do, they'll be easy enough for everyone to spot, analyze and publish the details of.
Also: backdoor on custom silicon doesn't mean as much as it does in a GPCPU.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:01AM (1 child)
Your submission is perfect. Thanks for it and the SID inspiration. Turns out the Google chips can be mixed-signal. Hmmm. I see there are already quite a few hardware clones out there but as of this writing I've done no more research into how good they are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6581 [wikipedia.org]
SID needs (wants?) VDD of 12 volts and VCC of 5 volts, so a direct drop-in might not be possible because the Google chip has a max of 10 volts if I'm reading it correctly.
But it may be possible to remove the VDD pin and just run from 5 volts. Research needed. Otherwise might be do-able.
(Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:02PM
As I recall, from memory, the old/first SID (6581) required 12vdd (and 5vcc), then one of the middle versions was 9v but the eventual updated chip (8580) worked with just 5vcc/9vdd. I think this is one of those things, or reasons, that might have killed a lot of chips -- when you install new chips in old revision motherboards and it juiced them with 12v. There was as I recall also slight sound differences with the filters and wave-generations in them so a lot of people seem to prefer the old one.
Most of the current replacement seem to favor the FPGA route to I guess reproduce the chip that way. Most of them do a fine job from the once I have tested or heard. But it's not exactly the same -- but then that might be complete crap on my part and nostalgia-ears making things up or hearing things that are not actually there.
My idea over all was mostly that I seem to recall that as an example MOS technology went defunct about 20ish years or so ago so I don't really know if there are any patent-holders around anymore or anyone that would care. There is a bunch of different re-creations of the SID but they are sort of there but perhaps not always all the way. Also since they are around I am inclined to think there is nobody jealously guarding their patents. If not there should be plenty of chips there to go for to keep say PET:s, C64 and even the Amiga with replacements. The situation might be similar for other machines.