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Google Will Fab Your Chips for Free

posted by Fnord666 on Monday July 06 2020, @11:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the free-as-in-beer dept.

looorg writes:

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

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:01AM (1 child)

    by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:01AM (#1017504)

    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.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:02PM

    by looorg (578) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:02PM (#1017567)

    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.