Breaking Taps

Hello friends, I'd like to present a new microprocessor that I designed: BreakingTTAPs v1

Been working on this for the last month or so, almost done and ready to send to the fab for tapeout! 🥳 I'm using a MPW shuttle service called wafer.space, and will be getting back 1000 chips in about three months.

The chips will be made with GlobalFoundries 180nm process, built using Spade HDL (transpiles to verilog) and Librelane/OpenRoad (open source build process to turn verilog into transistors)

I'll make a video about it eventually, but here are the high level specs:

- Transport-triggered architecture (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_triggered_architec…)
- around 20Mhz. simulations say it'll probably run faster but will start to glitch at some point
- Two 32 bit data buses (i.e. can execute two instructions per cycle)
- 1024 double slot instruction memory
- 256 word stack
- 4kb of general RAM
- 80 or so various instruction types (including some fun stuff like a pseudorandom number generator, multiply-and-accumulate and tanh functions for some light ML inference)
- 16 GPIO, SPI, UART and an 8 bit parallel memory loader interface

Crazy steep learning curve on this project, very long hours before/after work and I'm absolutely exhausted. I put it at 50% coming back DOA due to some kind of bug. But it was a great learning process and I'm jazzed to do more tapeouts in the future!

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18 hours ago | [YT] | 844

Breaking Taps

I've been making hinges. Very small hinges. Very normal thing to do!

Video soon talking about why Hinges Are Actually Kinda Hard to Design ™️ (for space anyway 😇)!

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9 months ago | [YT] | 1,424

Breaking Taps

This is a really cool build from Les' Lab! I made a janky version of this a year or two back and it grew... meh crystals. Did a bunch of reading about what it would take to make a proper crystallizer, saw it was going to be _a lot_ of work and moved on. So it's really cool that Les made one and documented the build so well. KDP crystals are awesome!

11 months ago | [YT] | 134

Breaking Taps

Yay! Cheers to y'all watching my niche and nerdy videos 😅

1 year ago | [YT] | 805

Breaking Taps

One leg's worth of robot parts 🦾

1 year ago | [YT] | 1,026

Breaking Taps

Working on the next iteration of BirdBot 🐤

1 year ago | [YT] | 1,059