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yoan9224today at 2:22 PM2 repliesview on HN

This is absolutely wild. Rendering graphics with just combinational logic and no frame buffer is the kind of constraint that breeds creativity.

The HAKMEM sine/cosine generator is such an elegant choice - it's numerically stable in fixed-point and requires only adds and bit-shifts. Perfect for hardware. I used a similar approach once for generating test patterns in an FPGA.

The fact that you can iterate on this in simulation, then deploy to actual silicon via Tiny Tapeout for $150 is honestly mind-blowing. We're living in the future.


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zahlmantoday at 6:21 PM

> The fact that you can iterate on this in simulation, then deploy to actual silicon via Tiny Tapeout for $150 is honestly mind-blowing. We're living in the future.

It's really cool but it doesn't seem practical at all. They aren't setting up print runs, just one-offs (https://tinytapeout.com/faq/#how-many-chips-will-i-receive-c...) and $150 could get you... many orders of magnitude more power than that.

... For that matter, apparently the microcontroller in the dev kit is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP2040 , which seems like a beast in comparison. And it's still available for less than $1 USD on PiShop.

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tails4etoday at 5:13 PM

How does this compare to CORDIC for sin/cos generation? Which is more accurate, etc ?

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