How to Make Your Own Computer Chip, Part 2
Today I had the opportunity to attend a live workshop in La Jolla hosted by Matt Venn from TinyTapeout where everyone in the audience had to design their own chip.
Matt Venn leading us in song, probably.
In the past, this would have been impossible to squeeze into a day long workshop with a lunch and plenty of breaks for music and chatter. With today’s open source tools, it was basically easy for most people participating in the workshop and almost all of the fumbling around occurred with trying to click and drag circuits into correct pinouts.
I should have brought an external mouse to this workshop.
I like that you can check your work with math. Math is good. Trackpads are bad
For me learning GitHub Actions was probably the highlight of the workshop. A lot of automated build tools are hard to use with the exact type of work I do and so I don’t always get the best DevOps experience, but it was cool to play around with automatically building 3D renderings of chip designs without having to set up crazy cloud infrastructure or install tons of software packages first. It’s crazy how far these tools have come even since I started working in tech during the 2020 covid shutdown. It would have been an unimaginable luxury to have something like that and now it was a thing where it wasn’t even the main point of another activity I was doing.
We’re in the future now. This is what I imagined the future would be like when I was a kid.
The workshop was sponsored by IEEE Region 6 and UCSD, I’m really glad I could participate without any real connection to either.
