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 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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Ware for January 2026 is a FNIRSI DPS-150. Tim nailed it almost immediately; congrats, email me for your prize! The DPS-150 is a small, portable DC “benchtop” power supply that converts USB-C into a range of voltages and currents. samchin convinced me to get one of these as an impulse buy in the Shenzhen […]
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 […]
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 […]
This month’s Ware is shown below: Do I sense a theme? Welcome to the tour of the various little gadgets I have littered around my desk for test & measurement! This one is likely to be guessed pretty quickly as well, but a shout-out to Ole for introducing me to this little gem. It’s pretty […]
The Ware for February 2026 is a WITRN C5. Congrats to Tim for guessing it, email me for your prize!
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 […]
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, […]
One of my latest projects is the Baochip-1x, a mostly-open, full-custom silicon chip fabricated in TSMC 22nm, targeted at high assurance applications. It’s a security chip, but far more open than any other security chip; it’s also a general purpose microcontroller that fills a gap in between the Raspberry Pi RP2350 (found on the Pi […]