[chbot] F18A

[Mark Atherton]

http://greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/DB001-101109-F18A.pdf

Most interesting machine. Looks Like it is half way between a forth 
hardware engine and a transputer. Sounds Like it should be an aircraft...

"The F18A is built from asynchronous logic, therefore its instruction 
times are naturally approximate.  The time required for all activity 
varies directly with temperature, inversely with power supply voltage 
(VDD), and randomly within a statistical distribution due to 
variations in the process of fabricating the chips themselves"

Also:

RAM:  18 bits wide, 64 words in each node.
ROM:  18 bits wide, 64 words in each node.

Instruction 'or'  - actually Exclusive Or.  Replaces T with the 
Boolean XOR of S and T.  Pops data stack -- someone has a sense of humour here.

I guess you can synthesise | from ! (  ( ! a) & ( ! b )  )

Looks like there are about 32 instructions total.

-Mark

At 12:38 p.m. 16/11/2010, Charles Manning wrote:
>Chunk Moore, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore, is another one of
>those over-achievers.
>
>He invented the Forth programming language and designed a few processors that
>run Forth.
>
>He also designed and a Forth-based PC + OS to match then wrote his own VLSI
>CAD system which he then used to develop some of his more recent chips.
>
>His new game is http://greenarraychips.com They make severely multi-core
>embedded chips: 144 CPUs in 1cm^2 . This is an async design that can execute
>instructions in 1.5 ns instructions. Sounds interesting.
>
>On Monday 15 November 2010 22:15:52 Mark Atherton wrote:
> > I was talking to one of the guys about 'real hardware' this evening,
> > none of this fancy x86 stuff, I mean my first 680kHz 6800 with 256 bytes
> > SRAM.
> >
> > Anyway, the subject of the Bill Buzbee's Magic 1 came up -
> > http://www.homebrewcpu.com
> >
> > Shortly after moving to NZ from about 40k from where Bill lives
> > (California), I found his project and helped with some of the bring
> > up of the hardware via email.
> >
> > So he has designed the instruction set, architecture, hardware,
> > assembler and re-ported a C compiler. Not bad for a software type !
> >
> > Also, just found his video on youtube -
> > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv2TxiwAquM - first time I have seen him.
> >
> > Also never seen MakeFair before - "an annual block party for
> > tinkerers" - sounds like Wed evening at Science Alive to me.
> >
> > Beware programmer who carry screwdrivers.
> >
> > -Mark