Hardware

Digital Design and Computer Architecture course, From Nand to Tetris are great.

teenage engineering & Apple make gorgeous and functional devices.

Chisel seems like an amazing framework for hardware designs.

Notes

• The next 20 years in semiconductors will be dominated by insanely large SIMD processors with massive stacked memory and network bandwidth.

Links

• Eero - WiFi router.
• Hardware effects - Demonstration of various hardware effects.
• LiteX - FPGA design/SoC builder that can be used to build cores, create SoCs and full FPGA designs. (Template)
• Migen (Milkymist generator) - Python toolbox for building complex digital hardware.
• The future of computing: a conversation with John Hennessy (Google I/O '18)
• Awesome Firmware Security
• FindChips (HN) - Get instant insight into any electronic component.
• Hackster - World's largest network for hardware & software developers.
• The Essential Guide To Electronics in Shenzhen (2016) (HN)
• Adventures in reinventing interfaces / Suz Hinton (2019)
• Learning hardware programming as a software engineer (2019) (HN)
• nMigen - Refreshed Python toolbox for building complex digital hardware. (HN)
• Glasgow Debug Tool - Tool for exploring digital interfaces. (HN)
• Everything I know about SSDs (2019) - Solid State Devices using NAND Flash, how they differ from Hard Drives, and how they affect file deletion and recovery. (HN)
• CRAY-1 Computer System: Hardware Reference Manual (1977)
• Cerebras CS-1 - Built from the ground up to accelerate deep learning in the data center.
• MIT 6.004: Computation Structures course (HN)
• Coding for SSDs
• hackrf - Low cost software radio platform.
• Awesome Hardware Description Languages
• Tindie - Buy and Sell DIY hardware products.
• Ventilators 101: What They Do and How They Work (2020)
• From the Transistor to the Web Browser
• PID Without a PhD
• How to flash an LED (2020) (HN)
• Espressif Systems - Semiconductor company.
• LLHD: A Multi-level Intermediate Representation for Hardware Description Languages (2020)
• LLHD - Low Level Hardware Description — A foundation for building hardware design tools. (Web)
• llhd-sim - LLHD reference simulator.
• moore - Hardware compiler based on LLHD.
• Let’s Make More Calm Technology (2019)
• Programming Parallel Computers course (2020)
• Nand to Tetris is a great course (2020) (Reddit)
• HAL - Hardware Analyzer.
• Playstation Architecture: A Practical Analysis (HN)
• Breadbee - Breadboard-able Cortex A7 dev board.
• Repository for Open Source Mouse Firmware and Hardware (HN)
• Hacking Together an E-ink Dashboard (2020) (Lobsters)
• Shoumik's PhD Defense "Interfaces for Efficient Software Composition on Modern Hardware" (2020)
• Bare Metal in a Cloud Native World (2020)
• My New Old Apple IIe Computer (2020) (HN)
• Computer Architecture - Introduction (2018)
• Basics of hardware hacking (Code)
• Building an IBM 3270 terminal controller (2020)
• Pinebook Pro Six Months In (2020) (Lobsters)
• GoKey - Bare metal Go smart card.
• USB-C is still a mess (2020) (HN)
• Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump (2020) (HN)
• rio - Open source library allowing you to create an internet connected LED wall.
• SkyWater Open Source PDK - Open source process design kit for usage with SkyWater Technology Foundry's 130nm node. (HN)
• The Magnetic Amplifier –– A Lost Technology of the 1950s, anyone can build it (HN)
• Jess Frazelle's gadgets
• Wireless is a trap (2020) (Lobsters) (HN)
• Domain-Specific Hardware Accelerators (2020) (HN)
• ShinySDR - Software-defined radio receiver application built on GNU Radio with a web-based UI and plugins.
• Hardware Floating Point (2020) (HN)
• Xbox Architecture (HN)
• Build an 8-bit computer from scratch
• Recommendations for running a rack-mount server at home? (2020)
• Apple Lightning (2020) (HN)
• Stack Computers: The New Wave (Lobsters)
• Commodore never made an Amiga Workbench smart watch OS, so I did instead (2020) (Lobsters)
• The Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation
• TinyPilot: Build a KVM Over IP for Under \$100 (2020) (Lobsters) (HN)
• Socialism’s DIY Computer (2020) (Lobsters)
• Terminal Server on a Budget (2020) (HN)
• NixOS on ARM/PINE64 Pinebook Pro (Code)
• Hardware interrupts (2020)
• Setting up a privacy-oriented Home Lab (2020) (Lobsters)
• Home Network Overview (2020)
• Nintendo DS Architecture (HN)
• Digital Design and Computer Architecture course (2021 Lectures) (2020) (2020 Lectures)
• SAFARI Research Group - Part of the Institute for High Performance Computing Systems in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. (GitHub)
• Mantis: Reactive Programmable Switches
• Computer Architecture Takeaways (2020)
• XLS: Accelerated HW Synthesis - - Aims to enable the rapid development of hardware IP that also runs as efficient host software via "software style" methodology. (Docs)
• Home Lab Beginners guide (2020) (HN)
• Low-level details of the Zen 2 microarchitecture (2020)
• Instructables - Community for people who like to make things.
• Programmable hardware with Andy Ray (Transcript)
• FuseSoC - Package manager and build abstraction tool for FPGA/ASIC development. (FuseSoC standard core library)
• Chips (Common Hardware for Interfaces, Processors and Systems) Alliance - Develops high-quality, open source hardware designs relevant to silicon devices and FPGAs.
• Insanity 4004 – Experiments with the world's first microprocessor (HN)
• Teensy - Complete USB-based microcontroller development system, in a very small footprint, capable of implementing many types of projects.
• HN: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for \$40B (2020)
• WLED - Control WS2812B and many more types of digital RGB LEDs with an ESP8266 or ESP32 over WiFi.
• The Hardware Lottery (2020)
• Computers Are Hard: hardware with Greg Kroah-Hartman (2020)
• Hardware Hacking Experiments - Several ways to extract firmware on embedded devices
• Ask HN: How to get into the chip industry? (2020)
• Hardcaml - OCaml library for designing hardware.
• Chisel - Hardware design language that facilitates advanced circuit generation and design reuse for both ASIC and FPGA digital logic designs. (Web) (Chisel Bootcamp) (Chisel Project Template) (HN) (Clean Template)
• chisel-circt - Library to compile Chisel circuits using LLVM/MLIR (CIRCT).
• Chipyard - Agile RISC-V SoC Design Framework with in-order cores, out-of-order cores, accelerators, and more.
• PyMTL - Open-source Python-based hardware generation, simulation, and verification framework with multi-level hardware modeling support.
• Freedom - RTL created by SiFive for its Freedom E300 and U500 platforms.
• Berkeley Architecture Research (Code)
• Running a Unix-like OS on a home-built CPU with a home-built C compiler (2020) (HN)
• The History of the Microprocessor and the Personal Computer (2020)
• Accelerating Sparse Matrix-Matrix Multiplication with GPU Tensor Cores (2020) (HN)
• USB3: why it's a bit harder than USB2 (2020) (HN)
• PS5 Teardown (2020) (HN)
• Stratix V accelerator card from eBay (2020) (HN)
• Ask HN: What is the best way to learn how to build your own hardware? (2020)
• Sega Master System Architecture: A Practical Analysis (HN)
• Microfactory 02 | DIY Home Shop, Setting up the Workbench (2020)
• PC build for deep learning, generative art (Tweet)
• Notes on building a deep learning PC (2020)
• Microcontroller VGA Interface projects (Lobsters)
• blokdots - Software to build interactive hardware prototypes without writing a line of code. (HN)
• Implementing Machine Learning on Massively Parallel Hardware (2020)
• Turing Pi 2 - Compact ARM cluster with 32 Gb RAM. (HN) (Docs) (HN)
• Home Made Standing Desk Raspberry Pi Controller (2020)
• AMD - High-Performance Processors and Graphics. (GitHub)
• NVIDIA - Designs graphics processing units.
• Xilinx - Inventor of the FPGA, programmable SoCs. Develops highly flexible and adaptive processing platforms. Owned by AMD. (HN) (GitHub)
• Have you considered buying used hardware? (2020) (Lobsters)
• Framework to understand RDMA
• Curated list of available fantasy consoles/computers
• Hardware-as-a-Service (2020) (HN)
• Is a billion-dollar worth of server lying on the ground (2020) (HN)
• Lattice Semiconductor - American manufacturer of high-performance programmable logic devices.
• Transistor 2N2222: all you need to know (2020)
• Open Source Hardware - Makers and STEM tutorials.
• Chips Alliance - Common Hardware for Interfaces, Processors and Systems. (GitHub)
• Hacker's Hardware Toolkit
• What is a System-on-Chip (SoC), and why do we care if they are open source? (2020) (HN)
• Advanced System-on-Chip Design Lecture Notes (PDFs) (2016)
• SpinalHDL - Scala based HDL. Language to describe digital hardware. (GitHub)
• AMD CDNA Architecture White paper (2020)
• reMarkable - Next-generation paper tablet. (Go CLI) (HN) (HN 2) (Awesome reMarkable)
• Quite the reMarkable Device (2021) (Lobsters)
• Branch Prediction Is Not a Solved Problem: Measurements, Opportunities, and Future Directions (2019)
• Hardware Debugging for Reverse Engineers (2020)
• Uniquely Identifying PCBs, Subassemblies, And Packaging (2020)
• Semiconductors: The Ultimate Bargaining Chip (2020)
• DIY NAS: 2020 Edition
• These are called opportunities (2020) (HN)
• ChipWhisperer - Complete open-source toolchain for side-channel power analysis and glitching attacks. (Docs)
• Building a new C64 in 2020
• A Modern Primer on Processing in Memory (2020)
• Fast14 Technology: Design Technology for the Automation of Multi-Gigahertz Digital Logic
• Inside the Apple II (2020)
• System Bus Radio - Transmits AM radio on computers without radio transmitting hardware. (HN)
• ChampSim - Trace-based simulator for a microarchitecture study.
• Clockwork - Polyhedral Analysis for Hardware Accelerators.
• ACE: Apple Type-C Port Controller Secrets (2020) (HN)
• MyHDL - Design hardware with Python. (Web)
• Morris Chang, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, Engineering Hero Lecture (2014)
• Memory-Centric Computing Systems (2020)
• Tenstorrent - Scalable and Efficient Hardware for Deep Learning.
• AI Chip (ICs and IPs) - List of ICs and IPs for AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning.
• embedded-hal - Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for embedded systems.
• The Confusing World of USB (2020) (HN)
• ARM - Architecting a Smarter World. (GitHub)
• HwURLs - Simple hardware news aggregator.
• Anatomy of a CNC Router (2020) - Everything you need to know to design your own CNC router. (HN)
• Bitbanged DVI on the RP2040 Microcontroller
• Examining a technology sample kit: IBM components from 1948 to 1986 (2021)
• Principles of Semiconductor Devices
• Resources to make a smart speaker
• SparkFun OpenLog - Open Source Hardware Datalogger. (Web)
• Jiga - Faster custom parts for hardware products. (App) (HN)
• Misoc - High performance and small footprint SoC based on Migen.
• A Primer on Analog Computing (2021)
• Cheap PCB - Better understanding the current status of hardware supply chain. (HN)
• Dumping the Super Game Boy 2 boot ROM (2015)
• Teardown of a quartz crystal oscillator and the tiny IC inside (2021) (HN)
• GreaseBoss - Real-time system to manage industrial greasing. (HN)
• Building an E-Ink Laptop (HN)
• Seminar in Computer Architecture - ETH Zürich (2021) (Talks)
• Framework Laptop - Upgradeable, repairable, and 100% yours. (Intro) (HN) (Lobsters)
• SparkFun Electronics - Manufactures and sells microcontroller development boards and breakout boards.
• Ask HN: Always on low power home server (2021)
• I want a computer that I own (2021) (HN)
• DIY Through Hole Plating of PCBs (2017)
• Cobalt - Collection of common Bluespec interfaces/modules.
• Flexible Internal Representation for RTL (Web)
• LATTE: Languages, Tools, and Techniques for Accelerator Design (Code)
• Capra - Computer Architecture & Programming Abstractions Research Group. (GitHub)
• Calyx - Compiler Infrastructure for Accelerator Generators. (Code)
• Dahlia - Time-sensitive affine types for predictable hardware generation. (Web)
• ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC (2021) (HN)
• Lobsters: Single board computers? (2021)
• DIY Split-Flap Display (Web) (HN)
• MANUZOID - Search for Manual Online.
• Why making chips is so hard (2021)
• The True Cost of Processor Manufacturing: TSMC 7nm (2021)
• Apples M1 Processor: The hardware behind the hype (2020)
• Apple Silicon Hardware: SPRR and Guarded Exception Levels (GXF) (2021) (HN)
• Adafruit - Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits.
• DIY Air Quality Sensor
• What other hobbyist "small devices" are out there other than the RPi? (2021)
• Fixing Xilinx's Broken AXI-lite Design in VHDL (2021)
• Oxide Computer - Servers as they should be. (HN) (Lobsters)
• Apple Has a Decade-long Lead in Wearables (2021) (HN)
• AMD Demonstrates Stacked 3D V-Cache Technology: 192 MB at 2 TB/SEC (2021) (HN)
• Denotational hardware design in Agda
• Zero to ASIC Course - Learn how to make your own computer chips. (YouTube)
• Cores that don’t count (2021) (Tweet) (HN)
• Khadas - Shenzhen based hardware manufacturer.
• Hardware Memory Models (2021)
• HN: Apple and Intel first to use TSMC 3nm (2021)
• Qualcomm - Semiconductor company.
• How Capacitive Soil Moisture Sensors Work (2021)
• Computing Performance on the Horizon (2021) (HN)
• TinyPICO - World’s smallest, fully-featured ESP32 development board.
• Performance Speed Limits (2019) - How fast can it go?
• Building a Curve25519 Hardware Accelerator (2021) (HN)
• Ask HN: Which vintage computers do you find interesting? (2021)
• Nothing - Technology should fade into the background and feel like nothing.
• How does n-key rollover work? (2021)
• Pillars - Integrated CGRA design framework.
• Reverse Engineering the M1 (2021) (HN)
• DIY Air Quality Sensor (2021) (Lobsters)
• Cat Printer - Portable thermal printer. (HN)
• What scientists must know about hardware to write fast code (2021)
• Deviceplane - Securely access remote devices and servers.
• It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware (HN)
• Awesome Open Hardware Verification
• Imagination - Low-power high-performance embedded IP cores.
• Experiments on a $50 DIY air purifier (2020) (HN)
• JeeLabs Projects
• Caravel - Standard SoC hardness with on chip resources to control and read/write operations from a user-dedicated space. (Docs)
• Efabless.com - Rapid design implementation leveraging an automated digital design flow and full chip template. (GitHub)
• Fault - Complete Open Source Design for Testing (DFT) Solution.
• NVC - VHDL compiler and simulator.
• Crowd Supply - Bring original, useful, respectful hardware to life.
• The Framework is the most exciting laptop I've ever used (2021) (HN)
• The Analog Thing - Open source, educational, low-cost modern analog computer. (HN)
• ChiselVerify - Hardware Verification Library for Chisel.
• Digital Design with Chisel Book
• Take a look inside Steam Deck (2021) (Lobsters)
• The Insane Innovation of TI Calculator Hobbyists (2021) (HN)
• Mac SE/30 odyssey (2021) (Lobsters)
• Intel, Mobileye, and Smiling Curves (2017) (Tweet)
• Practice Problems for Hardware Engineers (2021) (HN)
• Ask HN: What does one look for in a laptop these days? (2021)
• Apple’s M1 Pro/Max is the second step in a major change in computing (2021)
• Architecture of Consoles | A Practical Analysis (Code)
• PlayStation 3 Architecture (HN)
• Tesla Dojo White Paper (2021) - Guide to Tesla’s Configurable Floating Point Formats & Arithmetic. (HN) (Tweet)
• Teenage Engineering Computer-1 mini-ITX Chassis (HN)
• hgdb - Flexible hardware debugging framework. It offers runtime APIs to interact with the simulator.
• A History of Modern 64-bit Computing (2007)
• Titan M tools - Tools we used in our research on the Google Titan M chip.
• How do hardware timers work? (2021) (Reddit)
• Exploring the Processing-in-Memory Paradigm for Future Computing Systems (Tweet)
• Blacksmith – Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices today despite mitigations (HN)
• 80386DX ISA single board microcomputer (HN)
• Ask HN: What’s the best TV to buy? (2021)
• bazel_rules_hdl - Hardware Description Language (Verilog, VHDL, Chisel, nMigen, etc) with open tools (Yosys, Verilator, OpenROAD, etc) rules for Bazel.
• How to jailbreak an Amazon Echo Dot?
• What's the best PC gaming setup these days? (2021)
• Ask HN: Are there any 4K “dumb” televisions? (2021)
• Scan of the Month - AirPods Evolution
• Miniature 3456 LED cube
• Apple Neural Engine Internal: From ML Algorithm to HW Registers (2021) (HN)
• Cello - Genetic circuit design automation.
• Made To Spec: The Coming Age Of Prototyping As A Service (2021)
• C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful (HN)
• Braun Audio (Tweet)
• Canon Cat Resources (HN)
• Ten Lessons from Three Generations Shaped Google’s TPUv4i (2021)
• Agile Hardware Design Course (2022) (Code)
• Ask HN: Resources for “Learning” Manufacturing? (2022)
• Hardware Acceleration of Sparse and Irregular Tensor Computations of ML Models: A Survey and Insights (2020)
• Nanometer-Scale Ge-Based Adaptable Transistors Providing Programmable Negative Differential Resistance Enabling Multivalued Logic (2021) (Lobsters)
• How I built my own Sega Mega Drive hardware dev kit from scratch (2022)
• Kineto - CPU+GPU Profiling library that provides access to timeline traces and hardware performance counters.
• mmWave radar, you won't see it coming (2022) (HN) (Lobsters)
• Failing to reach DDR4 bandwidth (2022) (HN)
• DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study (2009)
• Creating Camera Lenses with Stereolithography (HN)
• Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected? (2022)
• A look inside the chips that powered the landmark Polaroid SX-70 instant camera (2022) (HN)
• The Semiconductor Ecosystem Explained (2022) (HN)
• Penkesu Computer - Homebrew Retro-style Laptop. (Web)
• Modified Microphone (2022)
• Ask HN: What books are recommended to learn re semiconductors industry? (2022)
• From Nand to Tetris - Building a Modern Computer From First Principles. (Code)
• Koika - Core Language for Rule-Based Hardware Design.
• Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express UCIe 1.0 Launched (2022) (HN)
• What you must know about Memory, Caches, and Shared Memory (HN)
• Pockit - Tiny, powerful, modular computer. (2022 Demo) (HN)
• SmartKnob - Haptic input knob with software-defined endstops and virtual detents. (HN)
• Oxide at Home: Propolis says Hello (2022) (HN) (Lobsters)
• A brief tour of the PDP-11, the most influential minicomputer of all time (2022) (HN)
• Semiconductors are more than just processors and GPUs (2022) (HN)
• Trusted Firmware - Open Source Secure Software - Trusted Firmware.
• Mac Studio M1 Ultra Teardown (2022) (HN)
• What ASML Has Next After EUV (2022)
• What made the NES so interesting? (2022) (HN)
• PipelineC - C-like hardware description language (HDL) adding high level synthesis(HLS)-like automatic pipelining as a language construct/compiler feature.
• PDL - Hardware Pipeline Description Language.
• LDgraphy - Laser Direct Lithography - Simple Laser Direct Lithography / Laser Direct Imaging for PCB manufacturing.
• Go THDL - Tool for easing the work with hardware description languages.
• SLEIGH Library - SLEIGH is a language used to describe the semantics of instruction sets of general-purpose microprocessors.
• USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021) (Reddit) (HN)
• Bareflank PAL (Processor/Peripheral Abstraction Layer) - Bareflank Processor Abstraction Layer.
• Can You Do 7nm Chips Without EUV? (2022)
• Using Depdentent and Affine Types for robust FPGA programming
• mxiot - Low-cost hardware prototyping platform to help you explore switching small IoT projects from bare-metal.
• Pcb-rs - Library to easily write software emulated hardware. (HN)
• List of awesome open source hardware tools
• Awesome Open Hardware
• Framework Laptop Mainboard (HN)
• Ask HN: What's the most stable form of digital storage? (2022)
• Awesome Semiconductor Startups
• Omicron - Oxide control plane.
• The X-Ray Tech That Reveals Chip Designs (2022)
• What scientists must know about hardware to write fast code
• The semiconductor bust – still coming? (2022) (HN)
• DuPont and “DuPont” connectors, and how to crimp them properly (2021)
• MEMS: The Second Silicon Revolution? (2022)
• Retro-style Computer with a Modern Core
• Framedeck - Cyberdeck built with the framework mainboard.
• VoCore - Coin-Sized Linux Computer. (HN)
• TSMC vs ASML: Who is the True Semiconductor King? (2022)
• How fast can a 6502 transfer memory (2022)
• The computers are fast, but you don't know it (2022) (HN)
• Big List of ABI Resources
• Designing Billions of Circuits with Code (2022) (HN)
• HDMI Firewall (HN)
• Ask HN: Are there any companies that are doing interesting work in hardware? (2022)
• Awesome Open Source Hardware
• Linear Address Spaces: Unsafe at any speed (2022) (HN) (Lobsters)
• Ask HN: Can competitors catch up to Apple Silicon? (2022)
• DigitalJS - Teaching-focused digital circuit simulator.
• Knox - Framework for formally verifying hardware security modules to be free of hardware, software, and timing side-channel vulnerabilities.
• Building a fast all-SSD NAS (on a budget) (2022)
• Dalorex: A Data-Local Program Execution and Architecture for Memory-bound Applications (2022)
• The Pine Formula (2022) (Lobsters)
• täko ̄: A Polymorphic Cache Hierarchy for General-Purpose Optimization of Data Movement (2022)
• Rift2Core - Based on Chisel3, Rift2Core is a 9-stage, out-of-order, 64-bits RISC-V Core, which supports RV64GC.
• Building a Panel out of e-ink Electronic Shelf Labels (2022)