Matthew Connatser reports via The Register: The ASIC designed to display the infamous Rickroll meme is here, along with 164 other miscellaneous features. This project is a product of Matthew Venn's Zero to ASIC course, which provides future chip engineers with the opportunity to “learn how to design and manufacture their own ASICs.” Since 2020, Zero to ASIC has become prohibitively expensive to create a single chip for one design, so as a cost-cutting measure, a single chip called a multi-project wafer (MPW) We accept multiple designs to be incorporated into. Zero to ASIC has two series of his chips: MPW and Tiny Tapeout. Typically, the MPW series only includes a small number of designs, such as his four designs for his MPW8 submitted in January 2023. In contrast, the original Tiny Tapeout chip contained 152 designs, and Tiny Tapeout 2 (which arrived last October) contained 165 designs, with the potential for more . Of the 165 designs, one that particularly resonates with me is Design 145, or Secret File, created by engineer and YouTuber Bitluni. His Secret File design for his Tiny Tapeout ASIC is designed to play part of his video for Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up music, also known as the Rickroll meme.
Bitluni was late to the Tiny Tapeout 2 project, being invited just three days before the submission deadline. He initially only created a visual persistence controller, but this was revised twice by him resulting in a total of three designs. “In the end, I still had a few hours left, so I thought I should upload the meme his project as well,” says Bitluni in a video documenting his ASIC journey. His meme of choice was, of course, Rickroll. Some might call it an Easter egg. However, given that each design has a total of 250 plots, there wasn't much room for both the graphics processor and the file to be rendered (a short GIF of the music video). Ultimately, this from 217 kilobytes he had to shrink to less than 0.5 kilobytes, and the output was similar to his 1977 game on his Atari 2600. Rickroll rendering processors and other designs are not easy to access. Bitluni created a custom circuit board that houses the Tiny Tapeout 2 chip, creating a device that can be connected to a motherboard that allows for specific design choices on the ASIC. Unfortunately for Bitluni, his original PCB had a design error that needed to be fixed, but the revised version worked and he was able to play Rickroll GIFs in hardware via the VGA port. I was able to display it.