I've always been fascinated with Chuck Moore's VLSI design tools. How does he ma... | Hacker News

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impeachgod on Sept 11, 2010 | parent | context | favorite | on: Yosefk - My history with Forth & stack machines

I've always been fascinated with Chuck Moore's VLSI design tools. How does he manage to design working VLSI chips with such limited functionality? Does he do complex simulation by hand? Wouldn't it get hard laying out each individual transistor?

thesz on Sept 11, 2010 [–]

I think he use combinatoric approach.

Yuo can describe a gate using transistors. Then you can describe a circiuit using gates and so on.

This is wildly popular in functional programming, and in Haskell in particular.

Take a look at those two libraries: Lava: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/chalmers-lava2000 and http://hackage.haskell.org/package/york-lava

and Wired: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/Wired

Wired is especially interesting because it let you simultaneously describe a circuit and its layout.

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