alt Hacker News> It turns out that this ‘sky130’ thing is like a … standard? Or something for making chips.
Very cool seeing someone completely naive going into this :)
If you want to read more about a bit more... cheaty way to do this, I have written about using formal verification machinery to straight up force the solution out of the netlist here: https://atx.name/electronics/asic-re/ . Could be a bit of an infohazard, but I think journey is the goal and yours was certainly more educational :)
Replies
vzcx • today at 11:32 AM
Nice solution and good easter egg find!
I'll definitely be reading this thankyou! I think this would have been a much better way to approach it, it's a bit of a joke in the piece that I always do things the hard way, but it's a genuine mystery to me why I operate this way.
I should add I have an EE degree (but have never worked as an EE), so even though I don't know industry standards like this sky130 thing, it's not completely foreign to me.