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[freqmax]

Anyone tried to scan the original Amiga chips in any way to recreate the logic matrix?

NMOS, but what nm process and die size has been used for OCS Agnus, Denise, Paula etc?

(This also means that even broken chips are worth keeping!)

[mongo]

Probably more trouble than it's worth.

Jeri Ellsworth has the schematics for the OCS chip set. Would be nice if they could be made available to the general public.

[Zac67]

You'd probably have a hard time finding someone still manufacturing in this process... The inner workings are pretty well known and have been replicated in UAE and Minimig.

[freqmax]

Originally Posted by Zac67

You'd probably have a hard time finding someone still manufacturing in this process... The inner workings are pretty well known and have been replicated in UAE and Minimig.

There's absolutely no need for anyone to manufacture in the original process. The process size matters for the scanning procedure.

What is known about the inner workings of these chips is a reverse engineering work process, it's very good. But it's not perfect.

Originally Posted by Digiman

This begs the question if you committed to producing at least a million units minimum how much it would cost per unit to produce a working 100% compatible classic Amiga motherboard of A500 and A1200 specs?

The PCB has already been done. So for the chips you seem to need 100k - 200k USD in addition each chip maybe cost 1 USD per chip?
Btw, have a look att EFF DES cracker.

Originally Posted by mikej

I am far more interested in the continuing polygonization (is that a word?) of the 68K - which I am working on.

How does the polygonization work, and is it reliable in determining the logic function?
Being able to use nitric acid, photograph (using microscope?), and then use algorithms to transform pictures into HDL-code seems really nice.

Is the 68k compatibility a huge issue?, 68000 + 68020?, maybe more critical than the custom chips?

[Digiman]

Originally Posted by freqmax

The PCB has already been done. So for the chips you seem to need 100k - 200k USD in addition each chip maybe cost 1 USD per chip?
Btw, have a look att EFF DES cracker.

What I meant was how much a single A600 (or A1200) compatible drop-in compatible motherboard with Agnus/Denise/Paula would each cost to manufacture today from scratch inc tooling up for mass production and all R&D. Assume you commit to producing one million units and exclude CPU costs. Go to China, give them the specs for everything and add R&D cost to invoice they charge for producing a million units. £100? £200? less?

It's far from easy to do, the first Amiga Technologies A1200 motherboard that rolled off the production line run at the factory in France was defective in the mid 90s!

[ferrellsl]

Originally Posted by Digiman

What I meant was how much a single A600 (or A1200) compatible drop-in compatible motherboard with Agnus/Denise/Paula would each cost to manufacture today from scratch inc tooling up for mass production and all R&D. Assume you commit to producing one million units and exclude CPU costs. Go to China, give them the specs for everything and add R&D cost to invoice they charge for producing a million units. £100? £200? less?

It's far from easy to do, the first Amiga Technologies A1200 motherboard that rolled off the production line run at the factory in France was defective in the mid 90s!

You're making too many assumptions to come up with a per unit cost of a re-production. Do you really expect someone on this forum to research all the variables and give you a discrete price for a product that has no demand in the real world? Or are you just asking a hypothetical question?

[Hattig]

Originally Posted by Digiman

What I meant was how much a single A600 (or A1200) compatible drop-in compatible motherboard with Agnus/Denise/Paula would each cost to manufacture today from scratch inc tooling up for mass production and all R&D. Assume you commit to producing one million units and exclude CPU costs. Go to China, give them the specs for everything and add R&D cost to invoice they charge for producing a million units. £100? £200? less?

It's far from easy to do, the first Amiga Technologies A1200 motherboard that rolled off the production line run at the factory in France was defective in the mid 90s!

I expect an entire A1200 could be implemented in a single ASIC on a cheap, but still reasonably modern process (e.g., 180nm). You could probably add on digital video and audio outputs, SATA, USB, etc as well whilst you are at it (so implement a typical expanded A1200 of 2011).

But with mask costs in the hundreds of thousands, you would truly want to be making tens to hundreds of thousands of the chips to make it worthwhile. But after that you would just need a sneaky "amiga in a joystick" product that accidentally left exposed pads on the PCB for all expansions, and you could get Amigas into many many homes again.

[bloodline]

These guys have done a few chips already (6502, 6800, 68000, SID, etc...), they have decapped, scanned and then recorded the logic layout... so they would be the first place to call :

http://visual6502.org/

-edit- just noticed that these guys are working out the entire logic for the VCS 2600... So given how that machine is related the the Amiga1000 they might be keen to do the Amiga


If on the other hand, you happen to have a ton of money, Chipworks Inc will do a private scan of the chips for you and give you everything you need

[bloodline]

Looks like the visual6502 guys already have Agnus, Denise, Paula and Gary in their chip collection... I guess we just need to harass them into scanning them

[mikej]

They are scheduled to be scanned.
I am far more interested in the continuing polygonization (is that a word?) of the 68K - which I am working on.
Getting the exact internal microcode (note, it is split into two tables to compress it) will be very interesting and reduce the size of the softcores considerably.
/MikeJ

[bloodline]

Originally Posted by mikej

They are scheduled to be scanned.
I am far more interested in the continuing polygonization (is that a word?) of the 68K - which I am working on.
Getting the exact internal microcode (note, it is split into two tables to compress it) will be very interesting and reduce the size of the softcores considerably.
/MikeJ

No idea when they will do them though, I can't be much help to them so I haven't made contact with them.

I also am keen to see the "polygonisation" of these chips not for recreation purposes (since I think MiniMIG and CloneA are probably a better approach), simply so I can see the choices the original design team made all those years ago

On the other hand some FPGAs with the original net lists on them would be super awesome...

[psxphill]

Originally Posted by mikej

Getting the exact internal microcode (note, it is split into two tables to compress it) will be very interesting and reduce the size of the softcores considerably.

I thought we had the microcode already, I'll ask around in case it's not public yet.

You can find the microcode in the 68000 patent, but we know it's got some wrong values.

[mikej]

Let me know if you have it.
I have the details from the patents, but it's not terribly useful.
With the die scan we can see how the ops are decoded. It's a very neat design, all of the "strangeness" comes out as a result of implementation.
/MikeJ

[Rodomoc]

It seems like Individual Computers did some detailed chip analysis at one time as well. If I am remembering correctly, various historical Clone-A documentation seemed to elude to this. It would seem logical that the data they collected was used to develop the various add-on cards like Indivision and the like, but do not quote me on any of this as my memory is more than a bit foggy on the subject.

[Thorham]

What I want to know is how much it would cost to do OCS/ECS/AGA in ASICs using the original layouts?