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Tech 80% · Gaming 10% · Writing 10%
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The Ware for June 2026 is shown below: This board is from my personal collection of “favorite boards” that I’ve collected over the years. A lot of old memories associated this one – both figuratively and literally. I’ve received some feedback that gmail in particular is marking my email updates as spam. Not sure I have a good way to fix this yet, as the blog is also under heavy attack from automated AI spammers at the same time (to the tune of several thousand requests a day). You’ll notice…
The Ware for May 2026 is, in FETguy’s words: “one of many large pc boards of a Rodgers Instrument Co church organ. The core memory was used to store and recall settings of the organ’s “stops”. There were 5 core memory boards in this instrument which differ in how many words were implemented. I photographed the largest one, which has 19 x 10 bit words, of which one is a spare, and then another word, I guess also spare, with no corresponding drive circuitry populated. So, 200 cores of which 180…
Last month’s name that ware demonstrates that even though non-destructive IR imaging is not capable of resolving an individual bit cell, at least at 22nm it is still possible to constrain the number of bits in an SRAM macro. An important step in establishing trust in a computer is measuring all of its state and confirming that nothing is amiss. A typical trusted boot would make a point of zeroing and/or patterning & hashing all the known bits of memory in a system. This process helps constrain…
The Ware for May 2026 is shown below. This month’s ware is on a theme similar to last month’s but about…50 years older. Lots of things change over the years, but the geometric organization of an array never goes out of style. On the other hand, I increasingly miss things that were designed for repair, containing self-documenting features like this one. Huge thanks again to FETguy and Renew Computers in San Rafael, CA for contributing this gem!
Seems like I overestimated people’s interest in looking at silicon images! Congrats to k8 for attempting the challenge, I appreciate the participation. email me for your prize! Recall that the list of possible memory dimensions is limited to a list of 28 possible types of memories. Given that, here’s the mapping of macros to memory types: Macro A – bioram1kx32 single port Macro B – udcmem1088x64 dual port Macro C – rf512x32 single port Macro D – rdram1kx32 dual port Macro E – aoram1kx36 single…
The Ware for April 2026 is a little bit different. Instead of showing a circuit board, I thought it’d be interesting to go inside the chips themselves and try to identify what’s happening on at the silicon level. Since chip reading isn’t a widely spread skill, we’ll start with a gentle introduction. For this series of wares, I’ll tell you exactly which chip these images are from: they’re from the Baochip-1x. It’s unique in that at least some of the source code is available – enough of it to…
The Ware for March 2026 is a Elecom DST C30SV 6 in 1 USB “docking station”. I’ll give the prize to tayken – the ware itself wasn’t terribly hard to guess on its own, so this month I’m just going with the first interesting response. Congrats, email me for your prize! As other readers commented, the device has a lot of similarity to other products in this class. I’m guessing there is a common board design that OEMs use to make variants of the product. Here’s additional context of the ware, for…
The Ware for March 2026 is below: This ware malfunctioned, so I took it apart to see what’s going on and now it’s this month’s Name that Ware. As it would be far too easy to guess if I showed the whole circuit board, this is just a portion of the whole ware. I suspect […]
The Ware for February 2026 is a WITRN C5. Congrats to Tim for guessing it, email me for your prize!
BIO is the I/O co-processor in the Baochip-1x, a mostly open source 22nm SoC I helped design. You can read more about the Baochip-1x’s background here, or pick up an evaluation board at Crowd Supply. In this post, I’ll talk about the origins of the BIO, starting by working through a detailed study of the […]
