WD9000 Pascal microengine schematics available

Brad Parker brad at heeltoe.com
Tue Nov 10 17:56:37 CST 2015


fyi:  from the 6502 faq:

/* How do you turn bitmaps into polygons?/
We draw them in our custom Python app.  We spent about two months 
looking at automatic vectorization and using the bitmaps to create 
polygon fragments, but neither of these was better than just sitting 
down and clicking out the polygons.  It's almost essential to have our 
own vector drawing app, so we can control snapping, do fancy copy-paste, 
get good vector data, and greatly speed up the work.

/* How did automatic vectorization fail?/
It was more work to clean up the results of automatic vectorization than 
to do clean work in the first place.  Damage, dirt, and ambiguous or 
falsely detected features in the chip die shots create problems.  We 
also rely on finding and modelingburied contacts 
<http://www.intel4004.com/buried.htm>like they would appear in the 
original fabrication masks, not like they appear in silicon.  This is 
very difficult, if not impossible, to do automatically.

I'm not surprised by this.  So in the end, a human brain figured out 
where the polygons are.  It might be a fun "internet distributed" 
project to farm out sections to lots of people and then assemble the 
results...

-brad



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