Fets and Crosses: Tic-Tac-Toe built from 2458 discrete transistors (schilk.co)

by voxadam 16 comments 70 points
Read article View on HN

16 comments

[−] SouthSeaDude 49d ago
A Work of art. I remember my dad building a computer using discrete TTL chips in our garage in Auckland. He took like two years and I'm guessing about five people saw it. I would love to see more of these on HN, but most don't get past a few upvotes in the sea of AI stuff.
[−] floxy 52d ago
Sweet. About the same number of transistors used in the Intel 4004.
[−] schobi 49d ago
Brilliant to get this done all the way through.

Once you introduce a HDL and start optimizing, I would expect more than half of the transistors to be redundant. But you would end up with a circuit that you will not understand any more.. But that could give an important lesson in chip design and HDL compilers.

[−] Neywiny 49d ago
Would standard HDL synthesis engines be better at this in terms of schematic capture? They could do optimizations that I think if I'm reading right weren't done here
[−] pankajdoharey 49d ago
That's a lot of transistors. Why do I feel it could be done in less? This is the absolute minimum number of Discrete transistors you need?
[−] amelius 49d ago
UX could use a delay before the next move.