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 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 […]
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 Dabao Evaluation board is a tiny new single-board computer with a USB 2.0 Type-C port, a 20-pin GPIO header, and a custom RISC-V chip called the Baochip-1x. It’s that last bit that makes this board distinctive. Designed by hardware hacker bunnie Huang, the Baochip-1x is a “mostly-open” chip designed for use as a security […]
The post Dabao is a $10 dev board with an open source Baochip-1x…
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 […]