Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all. May you find many PCBs and other electronics wizardry under your tree or pole.
Remember, support is available on Christmas. Just give us a shout in the forum.
About Minimal Fab and the ICPS PDK
Introduction
Recently I participated in the Minimal Fab Design Contest. I had a go at designing a transmission-gate D-FF using the provided template for the layout. You could only use the first metal layer to connect devices.
It was actually selected for fabrication! This image shows the layout of the wafer with all the submitted designs:
My design is the second die in the first row of the 5x5 array.
This was only possible because the Industrial CPS Research Center (ICPS) at AIST (Advanced Industrial Science and Technology) in Japan open sourced their PDK for the Minimal Fab SOI-CMOS process. In a follow-up blog...
Ламповый дисплей для компьютера. Часть 2 – ускорение и фокусировка электронов в ЭЛТ
В предыдущей части я привел обзор ряда подходов к созданию необычного дисплейного устройства. В отличие от приведенных примеров мне хотелось создать дисплей, который будет пригоден для регулярного пользования. Для этого я выбрал круглую индикаторную ЭЛТ от радиолокационной установки с зелёным цветом свечения экрана. О том, как удалось заставить её работать, рассказывается в этой статье.
Читать дальше →
LED Industrial Piercing
[Hardware] Illuminated circuit inside a hypodermic
Ручная работа со стеклом. Соединение деталей в плоские и объёмные конструкции
Работа со стеклом. Техника Тиффани
Стекло — особенный материал с необычными свойствами и, как правило, не вызывает энтузиазма при вероятном применении в своих работах, когда речь идёт о техническом творчестве в домашней лаборатории-мастерской. Слишком оно капризно в обработке, требует специального инструмента и приёмов, работа длительная и кропотливая. Тем не менее предложенная несложная техника расширяет возможности мастера-самоделкина и открывает ряд перспектив как художественного, так и сугубо утилитарного толка. Читать дальше →
2023 Winter Break
We hope everyone has a great holiday season! If you are trying to get in touch with the Great Scott Gadgets team please know tomorrow (December 22nd) will be our last day in the office until the 2024 calendar year! This means that we will not be available through email, on Discord, or via GitHub. See you all in January!
The transparent chip inside a vintage Hewlett-Packard floppy drive
While repairing an eight-inch HP floppy drive, we found that the problem was a broken interface chip. Since the chip was bad, I decapped it and took photos. This chip is very unusual: instead of a silicon substrate, the chip is formed on a base of sapphire, with silicon and metal wiring on top. As a result, the chip is transparent as you can see from the gold "X" visible through the die in the photo below.
The PHI die as seen through an inspection microscope. Click this image (or any other) for a larger version.The chip is a custom HP chip from 1977 that...
Hand-cranked Flux Capacitor
[Concept] Control the flow of time
Two interesting XOR circuits inside the Intel 386 processor
Intel's 386 processor (1985) was an important advance in the x86 architecture, not only moving to a 32-bit processor but also switching to a CMOS implementation. I've been reverse-engineering parts of the 386 chip and came across two interesting and completely different circuits that the 386 uses to implement an XOR gate: one uses standard-cell logic while the other uses pass-transistor logic. In this article, I take a look at those circuits.
The die of the 386. Click this image (or any other) for a larger version.The die photo above shows the two metal layers of the 386 die. The polysilicon and silicon layers...