Jane Street Blog - Can you design a chip? Announcing the protocol emulator ASIC competition
Last month, we asked you to reverse engineer a chip from nothing but its layout and teased a bigger challenge. Results and our favorite writeups are coming soon. In the meantime, here’s our next challenge! This time, you’re designing the chip, and we’ll pay to fabricate our favorite designs! We’re particularly interested in projects with unique functionality, as well as those that demonstrate novel approaches to design and verification methodologies! Winners will receive a fabricated copy of their chip, mounted on a dev boards, so they can test their design in real silicon. Design an open-source, general-purpose protocol emulator ASIC. Hardware protocols like UART, SPI, and I2C are simple enough that people routinely “bit-bang” them: toggle pins from software with careful timing instead of using a dedicated peripheral. A protocol emulator is a small chip built to do exactly that: a tiny CPU with an instruction set designed for reading pins, writing pins, counting cycles, and hitting ti