Matt Venn Announces Tiny Tapeout's Second Demoscene Contest — with a Free Tile for All
New sponsorship means it's possible to submit your demoscene-inspired chip design for production at zero cost.
Tiny Tapeout's Matt Venn has announced the project's second Demoscene Competition, offering free slots to have designs inspired by the home computing demoscene built into physical chips — and a chance at winning a variety of swag.
"The home computer demoscene has resulted in some amazing feats of hacking and pushing hardware to its limits," Venn explains of the competition's inspiration. "The Tiny Tapeout demoscene competition sticks to the same audio/visual output format, but instead of using an existing computer, you create your own ASIC [Application-Specific Integrated Circuit] hardware!"
Tiny Tapeout was born from Venn's Zero to ASIC Course, and dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for having chip designs manufactured into actual silicon — partly thanks to its use of free and open source process design kits (PDKs) and partly thanks to splitting a single chip design into numerous tiles. Participants can submit their open source designs to cover one or more of these tiles, and then all the tiles combined are built into the chips themselves — with every project submitted available to try, splitting the production cost between all submissions.
The second Tiny Tapeout Demoscene Competition, though, brings the promise of free access to all: sponsorship from Precision Innovations means that anyone can submit a single-tile design to the contest without having to pay a fee, though only paid submissions will receive a physical chip once manufacturing is complete. Entrants can also pay to expand their designs across two or four tiles, for larger projects.
More information on how to enter is available on the Tiny Tapeout website, along with a list of the winners from the previous demoscene contest.