F21d in fab

[jfox@xxxxxxxx (Jeff Fox)]

Dear MISC readers:

We submitted F21d yesterday to Mosis.  I will post the changes to the
technical specs.  Most changes are timing bug fixes and power bus widening.
F21d will not contain the echo timer or on chip ROM that were on F21c.
They will have to be tested on a different chip.  It should be back in 
late November for packaging.  The analog I/O coprocessor will be faster
and may have more resolution, it will have to be tested for accuracy 
and linearity.  The analog I/O coprocessor now has a 2Ghz counter internally
so it should be able to operate at a max of 30Msps.

I also talked to Chuck about Mosis's new .35 fab facilities.  We now
have the option to go to this smaller feature fab process.  According
to Chuck the design could use the current 2.6u tiles or rescale to
1.8u tiles.  Operational voltage would be half, frequency double, 
amperage and power dissapation should remain the same, and temperature
induced effects are expected to double.  The chip would become smaller
and cheaper to fabricate than in the current .8.  Even in .8 we could
move the pads around to reduce the chip size and fabrication cost by
half.

I very much like the idea that a .35 version of F21 would have a 
1 nanosecond instruction time.  The memory interface coprocessor on
F21 is already the bottleneck and is designed for old memories.  A
.35 design would really also require a new memory interface to use
newer faster memories.  However it will introduce so many unknowns
that I am reluctant to gamble on a run.  I prefer to see F21 working
in .8u since that hasn't been solved yet.  I think people would be
very impressed by a 1 square mm 1 Ghz microprocessor with built in
video card, sound card, network card, parallel port, rtc, etc.

I have made a number of changes in the store.  I invite you to stop
by once in a while and look at the new products and updates etc.  The
latest F21 emulator is now running at a max of 3.8 F21 mips on my 
120mhz pentium and displaying F21 graphics programs impressively fast.
I also got the first prototype Design Your Own Processor in FPGA kit
for review.  I will be putting it in the store very soon.

Jeff Fox