Build Your Own FPGA (2012)

Don't miss the gem in the comments...someone answers this question there: "Hi. Is possible use this like a "industrial" fpga? For example, for minning bitcoin? Because the fpga is very expensive here in Brazil, and the 7400 is cheap. "

Superneat project. Now someone needs to synthesize a CPU and build a big enough discrete fpga to run it (very slowly) on. A few comments for those playing at home: 1) Use less solder. When you get boards done at the pcb house, they usually put a solder mask. There is enough solder on the pads that you can solder SMD parts without adding more. Just flux it with a fluxpen, lay the part on top, and remelt it. Much…

Funny, just the other day at work I was trying to explain to someone what an FPGA was and I used the 7400 TLL example and said imagine if you had a crate full of TTL chips and you could put them all onto a single die, arrange them with the most common ones in little module called LUT's and then be able to cross connect any input to any output using a memory type array. The guy I was…

This reminds me when I first started getting into FPGA's... a looong time ago. I to code verilog by using this cool feature in Quartus, which was the design software for then Altera FPGA's (now Intel). It had this feature where you could draw a schematic using 7400 logic and it would turn that into the rbf file to config the FPGA. I just thought that was so cool at the time and it was a nice entre into that…