7400 Competition Winners Announced

The winners are out! See the blog post for details.

My own entry, the Discrete FPGA is one of the 15(!) first-place winners!

7400 Competition Reader's Choice

The 7400 competition has put up a Reader's Choice post, soliciting votes for readers' favorite submissions. It's also a great summary of all the excellent submissions this year.

Go check it out! Of course, if you wanted to leave a comment voting for my DFPGA project, I certainly wouldn't complain...

Build your own FPGA

The Open 7400 Logic Competition is a crowd-sourced contest with a simple but broad criteria for entry: build something interesting out of discrete logic chips. It's now in its second year, and this time around I was inspired to enter it.

Discrete logic, for anyone who isn't familiar, are any of a number of families of ICs who each perform a single, usually fairly straightforward, function. Typical discrete logic ICs include basic logic gates like AND, OR and NAND, Flip-Flops, shift registers, and multiplexers. For smaller components like gates and flipflops, a single IC will usually contain several independent ones. As you can imagine, building anything complex out of discrete logic involves using a lot of parts; these days they're typically used as 'glue' logic rather than as first-class components, having been largely supplanted by a combination of specialised devices, microcontrollers, and FPGAs.

Building a microcontroller or CPU out of discrete logic is a popular hobbyist pursuit, and it serves a useful purpose: building a CPU from scratch teaches you a lot about CPU architecture and tradeoffs; it's an interesting and instructive exercise. So, I wondered, wouldn't building an FPGA out of discrete logic be ...