Casey, > Here's a fun thought: while staring at the Visual6502 visualization, it > occurred to > me that the likes of Verilog and VHDL probably represent a rather tall order > to > new folks (like, hey, me,) and the idea popped in there. I personally find it > easier > to fathom designing circuits in a way that's both visual and programmatic, > just > because I'm a very visual/verbal person, and it fits my learning style well.
But did you actually understand the Visual6502 and not just the idea of it? I didn't, and I am reasonably familiar with that processor at the schematic level and also an integrated circuit designer (I have created a few chips at the "rectangle" level). The problem is quantitative - there are just too many rectangles changing color at once and there are too many to fit in the screen at a reasonable size. I really hate to deal with structural designs in Verilog or VHDL (as opposed to behavioral designs) which is why I use TkGate. Unfortunately, we get into quantitative problems again with screen sizes. My hand drawn schematics in the 1980s were always one to three pages of very large paper. You needed a big desk to be able to fully open them up and you could see both the big picture and details at the same time. It was easy to quickly trace some signal from one side of the design to the other. Now people do schematics on letter sized paper. The project is broken down into some 20 or so pages. Each page has just one or two integrated circuits (or subblocks) in them and wires running to the edge of the page to "connectors" that indicate other pages. In other words, this is a netlist and not a schematic and there is no advantage compared to the same thing in VHDL. It has the disadvantage of taking up 20 pages to do what VHDL would do in just 3. > It dawned on me that I could probably make a little Logo where the turtles > draw > with "metal ink." Has anyone tried anything like this before? Does it seem > like a > good idea to try it now? You might like Chuck Moore OKAD system which is used to create the GreenArray chips. The software is not available, but there are videos of him giving demos of it. Mostly in his "fireside chats": http://www.ultratechnology.com/rmvideo.htm http://www.ultratechnology.com/okad.htm http://www.colorforth.com/vlsi.html Note that the software evolved quite a bit from the early 1990s (when it was a "paint the rectangles" style) to the late 1990s and today, when it become a kind of programming language (the last page above, for example, describes the earlier version though it was updated in 2009). -- Jecel _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
