A group 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 accommodates nMOS and pMOS [N-type and P-type metal-oxide semiconductor] units as particular person transistors,” the group behind the mission 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 enable 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 immediately,” mission lead Peter Kinget explains in a chunk for IEEE Spectrum, “designing with the MOSbius gives expertise that is immediately 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 need, 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 completely different to, a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). By with the ability to management the chip on the degree of particular person transistors, it is doable to make use of the MOSbius as a tool in a variety of analog circuits. “The origin of the MOSbius was serendipitous,” Kinget notes. “Whereas getting ready a set of scholars’ IC initiatives to be fabricated, we realized we had room to squeeze yet another chip into the batch if we may meet the transport deadline. Six weeks later, the MOSbius was off to manufacturing!”
Extra info on the MOSbius is out there on the mission web site; Kinget is making a small variety of extra items accessible at a “nominal value” of $150, and is engaged on a revised design that could be produced in bigger portions if a industrial associate for the mission will be discovered.
