What do i need to do/learn to make my "Own" Microprocessor?

Question

I want to create my own microprocessor. What do i need, what do i need to learn? are there any courses? in England?

Answer 1

There are so many places to start, and a lot that needs to be known before you go diving into the microprocessor world.  One thing that you will need to know is that it takes a clean room, because any particles that get in the silicon before it's finished hardening or setting will basically destroy the processors chances of opearting correctly.  So if you can't provide that, then I would stop right there.

Additionally you will need to know design architectures, limitations of designs, die casting, forming the silicon, and a ton of other things.  I doubt there is any classes that will take you through everything.  You will have to go a bit at a time, there's a reason why there is only two mainstream microprocessor manufactures in the world.  Intel and AMD.

Take care,

Maria

Answer 2

WOW!

i dont know but if you were talking about microcontrollers, i might be able to help!

Answer 3

You need to have a master's degree in engineering, studying math (including calculus), electronic circuitry design, microprocessor design, and any of a dozen other courses about logic circuitry, transistor and IC theory, etc.

I will assume that you don't plan on building a high density IC chip, since you don't have the manufacturing skills.  (That would take another entire degree), so I'm guessing you'll wire this on a breadboard circuit.  Unless you actually ETCH a circuit board, which I do NOT recommend without a lot of practice (you actually "paint" the circuitry onto the unmarked circuit board, then allow an acid bath to eat away everything that is NOT marked, and what IS marked becomes the circuit, including circuitry to the transistor, capacitor, resistor and IC chip socket holes that you also have to drill PRECISELY for the components to fit.)

Expect your microprocessor to be at LEAST the size of your living room, unless you make different parts of the processor on different layers of circuit boards, connected together with metal posts holding all the different layers together, using wire cables connecting all the different layers electrically.

There's more, but get this much done first, and you can get the rest later.

OR, you could just go out and by a microprocessor chip from AMD or Intel (I prefer AMD).

In either case, no matter WHAT you decide, I really do wish you the best of luck - you'll need it {*GRIN*}.  Oh, yeah, and LOTS of money for the bare circuit boards, the acid, the resistors, capacitors, transistors, IC chips, wires, etc.  Again, good luck!  :-)

Additional comment:

I just read BillyZ313's answer, and that URL is excellent.  I'm enjoying the refresher course from the information here, but I expect it will soon be new info as I follow all the links.  Billyz, thanks.    Thumbs up to you   :-)

Answer 4

My first suggestion is to visit http://computer.howstuffworks.com/microp... This site will help you fully understand the inner workings of the microprocessor.  Once you have studied that i would move to the evolution of the microprocessor so you don't end up making one that is using old technology.  Read here for that information http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/librar...  Finally if you visit http://www.kmitl.ac.th/~kswichit%20/ you can get the MTK-85

8085 Microprocessor Training Kit.  With all this information under your belt the kit will be a great place to continue your learning.

Answer 5

Good for you. What you're asking is/was standard fair for EE students.

EE Comp architecture students were once required to protoboard a simple CPU with pipe-lined prefetch, translation, instruction decoding and simple accumulator functionality with nothing but 7400 series logic chips. This did not take a room full of discreet IC's. In fact about two dozen did the trick.

Today, EE students are using PLD's and FPGA's to do the same assignment. PLD's and FPGA's are a mass of programmable gate arrays that can be internally connected via software/hardware tools. Current arrays can easily be programmed to provide the exact (or more) functionality of early microprocessors--lots of links on the web.

Any of the two paths above will give you a terrific understanding of the logic and architecture of microprocessors. What you need to do is simply study discrete logic and logical building blocks. That's what both paths have in common.

Don't worry about the ion doping, clean room, diffusion equations, Si masking and etc. That comes later. And, in fact engineers who do the actual micro/dsp design don't worry about that.

Answer 6

Are you SURE you didn't mean Microcontroller? A Microcontroller is easy for a hobbyist if you base it around a PIC or AVR microprocessor.

A microprocessor is the actual chip on a microcontroller and as such requires a few years of high level study to even understand the technology.

You need to learn about architectures and microcode etc. There are plenty of courses about this. Once you know what an ALU is then you need to learn VHDL. VHDL is a hardware language that can be used to define logic including processors.

Then you can try out your design as a soft core on FPGAs such as Altera or Xilinx. It doesn't cost much in terms of tools and equipment to get this far.

The expensive bit is when you want to commit your design to custom silicon.