Re: MISC-d Digest V99 #44

[Christophe Lavarenne <Christophe.Lavarenne@xxxxxxxx>]

Antonio Jose Gomes says:
>...
>And is Chuck using traditional counters, built of digital gates made from
>normalized circuits ... ?
>...
>I supose he doesn't use only syncronous circuits syncronized to a GHz
>internal clock, does he?

No, he uses neither standard gates, nor synchronous global clock.
His design is full custom, as are his silicon simulator and all his tools.
He sizes each transistor at its optimum size, draws by hand custom cells that
he may then copy/paste/flip, and routes connections manually.
His design is neither synchronous (i.e. centralized broadcasted single clock),
nor asynchronous-speed-independent (i.e. lots of transistors to handle local
synchronizations through ready/acknowledge signals), it's self-timed:
the power of each transitor, and the load of each net, are taken into account
in his design (and by his silicon analog simulator, SPICE-like but much simpler
and faster), such that he uses the propagation delays through them to locally
order flip-flop transition events.  Each control wire is a separate "clock".
Instead of using an external single (crystal) oscillator, his design is a
switched net of self-oscillating loops (basically, take a loop of inverters:
if their number is even, they may stabilize in two different states, as does a
memory cell which is basically a loop of two inverters; but if their number is
odd, they may not stabilize, they oscillate; by switching between different
loop configurations, you may control the oscillation period and phase, it's a
lot of fun).

>Chuck, I think, deserves a high respect for the acheivements he has
>acomplished throughout the years and I personally believe that the best
>way for his technology survive all the dificulties that has been exposed
>to is to share his knowledge in the theoretical field so that others can
>also try to experiment with it if they like it.

I was in your state of mind when I convinced a group of small french companies
to support Chuck in his development of OKAD and of misc processors, but I
discovered to my own prejudices that it's hopeless, because if Chuck is a kind
of genious technically speaking, he has a very poor conception of human
relationships, very close to what we call "escroquerie" (swindling) in France
(see my march-17th mail to the misc mailing list).  When his adventure with iTV
comes to end, maybe he will be sorry and change his mind, this would be top,
maybe also his originality will die with him, this would be a shame.

CL
--
I don't speak for INRIA, only for myself.

email: Christophe.Lavarenne@inria.fr		tel: +33(0)1.39.63.55.80
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