Enthusiast designs his first silicon chip and gets it back working

Zachary Tong, with no prior chip or FPGA experience, wrote a microprocessor using Transport Triggered Architecture and sent it to GlobalFoundries via wafer.space's 180nm GF180MCU shuttle. The chip came back alive, running at 18-20 MHz with 1024 program slots, 4 KB of RAM and roughly 80 operations across 20-30 functional units. SPI and UART on the die are dead.

• Chip runs at 18-20 MHz with 1024 program slots of two instructions each
• About 80 operations across 20-30 functional units, 4 KB RAM and 256 stack words
• SPI is dead on the die and UART is a write-off, though recovery is possible
• Logic written in Spade, layout done with open-source tools