The revolutionary Intel 8008 microprocessor is 45 years old today (March 13, 2017), so I figured it's time for a blog post on reverse-engineering its internal circuits. One of the interesting things about old computers is how they implemented things in unexpected ways, and the 8008 is no exception. Compared to modern architectures, one unusual feature of the 8008 is it had an on-chip stack for subroutine ca ...

Normally when we bring you news of a retrocomputing design, it will centre around a single processor. At its heart will be a 6502, a Z80, or perhaps a 6809. There will be a host of support chips, some memory as RAM or ROM, and a bunch of interfaces. [Erturk Kocalar]’s RetroShield project for the Arduino Mega breaks all of those rules, because it supports all three of those classic processors, has no support ...

Description A small PCB designed to attach to the backside of the FLIR Boson Thermal Camera. The PCB facilitates configuration of the camera along with capturing data to an SD card. This project is mostly an exercise in project-based learning. Instead of researching and reading about FPGAs, I want to create a project actually using them. Of course, this means that I'll likely get things wrong, but that's ju ...

Process computer designs usually start out with an accelerometer. As reliability problems creep in, making the switch to a more “professional” solution is beneficial. Accelerometers are based on the MEMS principle: instead of being a purely solid-state affair, the inside of the chip contains a micromechanical motion sensor along with a small mass. In addition to that, a set of transducer circuits are provid ...

By bringing the power of open-source and agile hardware design to the semiconductor industry, SiFive aims to increase the performance and efficiency of customized silicon chips with lower cost. The Freedom E310 (FE310) is the first member of the Freedom Everywhere SoCs family, a series of customizable microcontroller SoC platforms, designed based on SiFive’s E31 CPU Coreplex CPU for microcontroller, embedde ...

The ESP8266 chip, and the boards based around it, have been the new hot new thing this past year. Overnight it became — almost by stealth — one of the leading platforms for the Internet of Things. This runaway success quickly gathered a community, and it’s possible Espressif Systems may repeat that next year with their new ESP32 chip. About a month ago the makers of the ESP8266 started trailing their next p ...

Dubbed Denver, the processor will be used in the firm’s first 64-bit version of its Tigra K1 mobile processor designed for Android smartphones and tablets. This new version of Tegra K1 pairs our 192-core Kepler architecture-based GPU with the 64-bit, dual-core CPU. Each of the Denver cores implements a 7-way superscalar microarchitecture (up to 7 concurrent micro-ops can be executed per clock), and includes ...