A staff at Columbia College’s division {of electrical} engineering is seeking to make it simpler for college students to experiment with analog electronics in {hardware} — by creating the transistor-level equal of a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), dubbed MOSbius.
“The MOSbius chip incorporates nMOS and pMOS [N-type and P-type metal-oxide semiconductor] gadgets as particular person transistors,” the staff behind the undertaking explains, “in addition to in typical configurations like present mirrors, differential pairs, frequent supply configuration, easy operational transconductance amplifiers or inverters. [The] transistors and circuits on the MOSbius chip permit the scholar to create an digital circuit that they’ll consider experimentally.”
MOSbius goals to do for analog chip design what the FPGA did for digital, providing a field-programmable transistor array. (📷: Peter Kinget)
“As these [transistors] are the constructing blocks of most analog built-in circuits right now,” undertaking lead Peter Kinget explains in a chunk for IEEE Spectrum, “designing with the MOSbius supplies expertise that is instantly related to creating actual chips. We program the MOSbius’s matrix utilizing a Raspberry Pi Pico working a Python script that turns a easy JSON textual content file into the specified bitstream. If you’d like, although, you should use just about any 3.3-volt microcontroller that helps Python.”
In impact, the MOSbius is a field-programmable transistor array (FPTA) — impressed by, however totally different to, a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). By having the ability to management the chip on the stage of particular person transistors, it is doable to make use of the MOSbius as a tool in a spread of analog circuits. “The origin of the MOSbius was serendipitous,” Kinget notes. “Whereas making ready a set of scholars’ IC initiatives to be fabricated, we realized we had room to squeeze another chip into the batch if we might meet the delivery deadline. Six weeks later, the MOSbius was off to manufacturing!”
Extra info on the MOSbius is obtainable on the undertaking web site; Kinget is making a small variety of extra items accessible at a “nominal worth” of $150, and is engaged on a revised design that could be produced in bigger portions if a business associate for the undertaking will be discovered.
