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  • How much of this is AI?
    by netik
  • Make it into a company. Name it Sanfran.
    by effnorwood
  • You might want to make the port index instead a bit mask, that will let you support multicast and also selective broadcast flooding (although if you have limited space you’ll likely make broadcast flooding the default).
    by lukeh
  • That memory constraint is a real killer on the chip, even one that is a first generation toy like this. Only having 4 entries in the forwarding table is going to be an immediate problem if that switch is ever connected to another switch.

    I wonder if it wouldn't make sense for one of the ports to be designated the "uplink" port and if the switch receives a packet destined for something not in the table it forwards it out the uplink port so long as the packet did not arrive via that port. It could even save a bit of memory by not storing entries for the uplink port in the table.

    by jandrese
  • Nice! I've been following waferspace and tiny tapeout loosely but I'm sadly not in a position to be able to work on something right now.

    I'm surprised you managed to fit something like this in a TT grid square.

    by inigyou
  • Great project & article. Beyond the use of verilog, I couldn't find a description of the EDA stack. What tooling is used for the physical stages of design: place & route, LVS, DRC, and electrical circuit simulation (SPICE)?
    by roadbuster
  • This is extremely cool, I've played with FPGA design but never really even looked into custom ASIC design due to budget concerns. I hadn't heard of the tinytapeout project. Any recommended links for getting started?

    I have a (really dumb, kinda meme-y) project involving a dead hakko soldering iron and "Internet of Soldering", a custom ASIC for the actual front-end would be the appropriate level of silly and possibly could fit in the project budget.

    by zrobotics
  • “ Cut-through vs Store-and-Forward”

    I had a Google interview collapse because the last interviewer was a Principle Engineer who just couldn’t accept that a switch will ever forward a frame before reading in full and checking the FCS.

    I was too much of an idiot to go along with it and instead ended up having an argument with him.

    by noncoml

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