homebrewed 32-bit cpu?

[Jos Dreesen / Marian Capel]

> 
> Billy responds:
> 
> That was pretty much the modus operandi on early MSI/LSI chips.  All of the
> early ASIC's I worked with were bread boarded from SSI or even single gate
> ICs.  The vendors would provide design kits with lots of these little chips.
> Most of them were 4 or 8 pins; a few were 14 or 16 pins.  You can still buy
> them today to patch bugs on LSI until you can roll the metal.  First ones
> were TTL, then they moved to CMOS.  I even remember one ASIC that we used
> ECL gates on.
> 

I still have ca. 4000 TO-5 cans that contain two bipolar transistors 
each, nothing else . These were intended for IC prototyping.
Now what was the 8080`s transistor count again ?...

Today patching IC's is done with the spare gates that are distributed 
along the regular logic.

wrt to homebuilding TTL based cpu's : the fun part is the design. The 
actual building takes a lot of dedication. I would advice against 
building a 32 bit cpu as a first project.


					Jos