Hello List.
Today in our weekly Mumble Session we talked about a smaller chip, which could be realized before the Northpoint.
The Reason is mostly, that the Northpoint (as an small MCU) - beside the Standard Cells - also has some challenging Analog Stuff (like the ADC, Pad-Cells) which set the hurdle a little bit high.
We need some physical haptic fancy / shiny silicon before which gives us also a realistic way to verify our simulation after model measurement we do with PearlRiver. Something we could hand over to other people and which blinks..
Well, we came across the well-known "triple-5 chip". The original NE555 [0] was developed by the Swiss electronics engineer Hans Camenzind [1] and get cloned by nearly all silicon firms on the market in this era. Great starting points for our CMOS-based clone are the wikipedia site and the free eBook [2] of the original author. I strongly recommend everybody to read this great book!
Mostly the 555 chips are in the -55 to +125 C temperature range - the same we assume for our technology. And the voltage supply goes up to +18 Volt, I already saw 555 which worked with higher voltage. If we like, we could using our BiCMOS feature for the output driver - driving the same current with less power consumption.
The 555 chip has a legendary status between electronic engineers, radio amateurs and tinkers. And some of them writing obeisance on hackaday.com still in 2018 [3]. Many variations of the chip are still in production. Short - the 555 would be a great try-out for LibreSilicon! And I am proud to announce that Ferenc will be our Lead for the "LS 555" (LibreSilicon triple-5). Thanks Ferenc for your commitment!
Regards, Hagen.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_timer_IC [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Camenzind [2] http://www.designinganalogchips.com/ [3] https://hackaday.com/2018/10/10/the-555-and-how-it-got-that-way/