Tiny Tapeout: From idea to chip design in minutes!
TL;DR (i didn't do a deep dive, just a skim) they've laid out a chip into a grid of small areas and you can submit a design for one of the areas. Then they make a chip that has everybody's designs on them, so when you get your chip it has your design, and everybody else's that you can play with. The areas each have room for about 400 gates in which people have built stuff like a 4 bit CPU. An area in one corner is the "master scheduler", it multiplexes and delivers 8 bit input sequentially to each area, and gathers 8 bit outputs from each area, at the rate of about 15khz.<p>using all their tools and documentation to create your design is free, at a certain point when it gets to committing they have a pricing scheme which is intended to be affordable.<p>(note: they've been doing versions of this, the last one was tape out 2, now is tape out 3, and I was not careful about checking which version specs I was skimming so perhaps the new one is more capacious or the last one less.)<p>from <a href="https://hackaday.com/2023/02/14/supercon-2022-matt-venns-tiny-tapeout-brings-chip-design-to-the-masses/" rel="nofollow">https://hackaday.com/2023/02/14/supercon-2022-matt-venns-tin...</a><p>personally, I think it would be just a bit cooler to have a dual channel 40kHz system that could do DSP on high quality audio, but you can do plenty with this