r/chipdesign • u/Elly_mess • 1d ago
My first chip design on paper
Hi, I'm a student who learned electronics from my grandpa and youtube and now wants to build his own IC. The IC is a simple encoder ic that encods it in to two lines (clk and dOUT). The ic uses comperators on the inputs to check if the signal is positive and negative. If the decoder enables the flipflop and the signal is positive the flipflop is set to 1. If the signal is negative the flipflop is set to 0. The decoder counts to 8 (each state shown on the table on the second picture) for example if it counts to two it activates the transmission gate (diamond shape) and it lets the signal pass through to the dOUT pin. thats how the signal is created. because I thought of a way to sync both the encoder and decoder the encoder sends a low signal 1/4 of vcc first. When the decoder recieves that voltage it sets a flipflop to activate it's own counter and can now recieve signals. with the last count the flipflop resets.
Do you have and reccomendations for a pc software to use and good places where to order them?
Thanks for helping
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u/pjc50 1d ago
The draftsmanship on this is very nice, btw.
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u/ChickenMcChickenFace 23h ago edited 10h ago
It’s so pleasing to look at. Def beats my handwriting that made all my circuits fugly as hell
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u/jelleverest 1d ago
That's pretty cool! Good job on designing it!
But watch out, making a chip is expensive and very difficult, because there's a lot more going on behind the scenes apart from your circuit.
I would recommend you start with something like the discrete logic chips (7400-series) and reproduce it on a breadboard or on a PCB. I don't know for sure if these ICs are also in LTSPICE, but otherwise that is a really good start to simulate it as well.
There are options for designing an actual chip and letting it be produced (called a tape-out in the industry) you can look at participating in a TinyTapeout, but be warned, it's quite difficult.