Build your own FPGA - Nick's Blog
The Open 7400 Logic Competition is a crowd-sourced contest with a simple but broad criteria for entry: build something interesting out of discrete logic chips. It's now in its second year, and this time around I was inspired to enter it.
Discrete logic, for anyone who isn't familiar, are any of a number of families of ICs who each perform a single, usually fairly straightforward, function. Typical discrete logic ICs include basic logic gates like AND, OR and NAND, Flip-Flops, shift registers, and multiplexers. For smaller components like gates and flipflops, a single IC will usually contain several independent ones. As you can imagine, building anything complex out of discrete logic involves using a lot of parts; these days they're typically used as 'glue' logic rather than as first-class components, having been largely supplanted by a combination of specialised devices, microcontrollers, and FPGAs.
Building a microcontroller or CPU out of discrete logic is a popular hobbyist pursuit, and it serves a useful purpose: building a CPU from scratch teaches you a lot about CPU architecture and tradeoffs; it's an interesting and instructive exercise. So, I wondered, wouldn't building an FPGA out of discrete logic be similarly educational? Hence, my competition entry: an FPGA (or rather, a 'slice' of one) built entirely out of discrete logic chips.
