We already have chips that we're not really able to reproduce, like some of the custom chips and ULA (Uncommitted Logic Array) in older micro computers. The fabs and technology is abandoned, and while we might be able to recreate it the results might not be completely identical chips.
Think of all the chips from then and before then that are becoming rare. The hobbyist and archivist community do their best with modern replacements, keeping legacy parts alive, and things like FPGAs, but to be able to fab modern drop in replacements for rare chips would be amazing.
Things don't have to be ultra modern to offer value.
There's plenty of foundries cheaply fabbing chips in "obsolete" process nodes. If the original design from 25+ years ago is available, there's no reason why it couldn't be fabbed today in those quantities.
Depends on where the chip is and what it did. It's possible to hide chips between layers, hide chips under chips, replace an existing chip with something that looks almost just like it with additional functions.
It's really not hard to imagine some smart people being told to make it work.
After I been watching a ton of videos about retro-computing, mostly C64 and Amiga, I've been wondering if it would be possible to remake the custom Commodore/MOS chips. You can't get the original schematic and masks obviously, but the chips are pretty big by modern standards. Surely you could send a functional chip to China and have it reverse engineered.
You also don't need 5nm processing nodes to remake them, even a 130nm would be an improvement, and I have the feeling that even on 40nm there would be ample fabs able to make them.
It's probably more difficult than I imagine, and less efficient than just replacing the whole system with a FPGA.
I wonder if it's possible to retool production lines to keep going without the chips, then add them later. It increases WIP but we saw this in the 80's with computers; they soldered sockets for those chips then only needed to snap them in to complete the machine.
Nice work. These things, and also PAL and/or GAL chips are in a lot of older computers, and have to be cannibalized from another computer to replace. For the PAL/GAL chips, an automated "fuzzer" type rig to reverse engineer them would be nice to have.
Looks like decent progress being made on cooking up modern replacements for some of the custom chips, too. The prospect of being able to make fully-populated logic boards from off the shelf parts is exciting!
You are aware that making a chip with any reasonable processing power either requires using existing designs, or teams of hundreds of people for several years, yes?
You're back to trusting trust. Or using toy computers.
Actually decapping the original chips is very much a thing. See for example Chris Smith's work mapping out the innards of the ZX Spectrum ULA - http://www.zxdesign.info/book/insideULA.shtml .
It would seem exceedingly difficult to reuse chips at scale. The software and pcb is deigned around one microcontroller in particular and it is not trivial to swap them out with others.
So if I design my washing machine around a particular chip, I could order a million of them for 5 cent each, or I would have to:
* somehow identify other models which have the chip
* find 1 million of them about to be discarded
* rip them open, desolder, collect these parts
* discard the rest of the machine
* do this for about 10 cents per washing machine
combined with the fact that washing machines usually last a decade and will be dying out over a time period spread out over 10-20 years after manufacturing time. How on earth would it be possible to pull off and by that time, these chips will be very obsolete / impossible to order new ones.
I wonder if you could fuzz a chip directly, without having the schematics, so that if the manufacturer inserts something off-the-books it still gets explored.
I don't know anything about chip design and manufacturing, so I might be way off, but could you just send working Commodore chips to China, and have someone make a clone. It seems like replicating 25+ year old chip technology should be easy enough, or are there simply no plants left that can create compatible chips?
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