I, Intel



So, I was looking to design my own chips for some custom hardware I was putting together. Well, not really, but I just read this article on how to create your own custom chips. It's pretty neat. You don't need a $500,000,000 fab plant. You don't even need $100. Read on.



You can design your own chips at home with a PC using no more than about $50 of equipment and I'm going to tell you how with the absolute minimum of effort.



I'm going to make some basic assumptions: that you vaguely know a language with C like syntax and have a vague idea that digital electronics is about manipulating binary data represented in wires by a voltage level using logic gates.



You can't design your own components completely from the ground up at home, for that you do need a lot of expensive equipment. But what you can do is program what are known as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) or Complex Programmable Logic Devices (CPLDs). These are large arrays of logic gates connected by a complex network that allows you to connect any gate to any other pretty much however you want. In effect you design a logic circuit on a PC that is downloaded to a chip...



A Verilog Introduction for Hackers



Tomes



A great post on Kuro5hin asks:



What books have influenced your life?



Cojones



Infosys Technologies, an India-based software development company with its U.S. headquarters in Fremont, asked the state for more than a million dollars in tax relief, saying the standard tax formula fails to reflect that two-thirds of its U.S. work is done offshore.



In its petition to the California Franchise Tax Board, Infosys argues that it pays its engineers in California nine times more than those in India and that difference inflates its California tax liabilities.



State tax officials rejected the claim last week. But the request for a lower tax burden by the company -- which derives about 75 percent of its $1 billion a year in revenue from U.S. companies -- left some observers dumbfounded.



``They're asking for a tax break on the grounds their payroll costs one-ninth in India,'' said Lenny Goldberg, director of the California Tax Reform Association. ``It takes a lot of nerve to ask that, considering the context in which they operate.''"



Tax relief for offshoring?