Scanning the original chips

[freqmax]

You'd probably have a hard time finding someone still manufacturing in this process... The inner workings are pretty well known and have been replicated in UAE and Minimig.

There's absolutely no need for anyone to manufacture in the original process. The process size matters for the scanning procedure.

What is known about the inner workings of these chips is a reverse engineering work process, it's very good. But it's not perfect.

This begs the question if you committed to producing at least a million units minimum how much it would cost per unit to produce a working 100% compatible classic Amiga motherboard of A500 and A1200 specs?

The PCB has already been done. So for the chips you seem to need 100k - 200k USD in addition each chip maybe cost 1 USD per chip?
Btw, have a look att EFF DES cracker.

I am far more interested in the continuing polygonization (is that a word?) of the 68K - which I am working on.

How does the polygonization work, and is it reliable in determining the logic function?
Being able to use nitric acid, photograph (using microscope?), and then use algorithms to transform pictures into HDL-code seems really nice.

Is the 68k compatibility a huge issue?, 68000 + 68020?, maybe more critical than the custom chips?

[psxphill]

Let me know if you have it.
I have the details from the patents, but it's not terribly useful.
With the die scan we can see how the ops are decoded. It's a very neat design, all of the "strangeness" comes out as a result of implementation.
/MikeJ

All I've dug out of my email archives so far is an email from Nick Tredennick.
 
> The best description of the internal workings of the MC68000 can be found in Chapter 11 of Francois Anceau's
> textbook The Architecture of Microprocessors. It does, however, contain a few errors.


The guy we use for decapping is MIA (we don't pay him anywhere near as much as he gets paid for real work, so it's pretty understandable). So it might still be sitting in his queue all these years later.
 
You probably don't want to implement the 68000 microcode though as the ALU was 16 bit, so performance wouldn't be that great. Cycle accuracy of the CPU on the Amiga was never that necessary, however for Atari ST emulation you really need it if you want to get all demos working.
 
If you just want it for inspiration then the book and patent are more likely to be useful. Otherwise it might be better to get a 68020 decapped.

[Digiman]

The PCB has already been done. So for the chips you seem to need 100k - 200k USD in addition each chip maybe cost 1 USD per chip?
Btw, have a look att EFF DES cracker.

What I meant was how much a single A600 (or A1200) compatible drop-in compatible motherboard with Agnus/Denise/Paula would each cost to manufacture today from scratch inc tooling up for mass production and all R&D. Assume you commit to producing one million units and exclude CPU costs. Go to China, give them the specs for everything and add R&D cost to invoice they charge for producing a million units. £100? £200? less?

It's far from easy to do, the first Amiga Technologies A1200 motherboard that rolled off the production line run at the factory in France was defective in the mid 90s!

[ferrellsl]

What I meant was how much a single A600 (or A1200) compatible drop-in compatible motherboard with Agnus/Denise/Paula would each cost to manufacture today from scratch inc tooling up for mass production and all R&D. Assume you commit to producing one million units and exclude CPU costs. Go to China, give them the specs for everything and add R&D cost to invoice they charge for producing a million units. £100? £200? less?

It's far from easy to do, the first Amiga Technologies A1200 motherboard that rolled off the production line run at the factory in France was defective in the mid 90s!

You're making too many assumptions to come up with a per unit cost of a re-production.  Do you really expect someone on this forum to research all the variables and give you a discrete price for a product that has no demand in the real world?  Or are you just asking a hypothetical question?

[psxphill]

This begs the question if you committed to producing at least a million units minimum how much it would cost per unit to produce a working 100% compatible classic Amiga motherboard of A500 and A1200 specs?

It doesn't beg the question.
It raises the question. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
 
If you wanted to make it as cheap as possible, you want as few components as possible and a board just big enough for the io connectors.
Something like an fpgaarcade in a different form factor.
 
To make something that looks like an a500 is going to be pretty expensive because of all the sockets and chips. It was designed at a time when commodore made all of their own stuff, so it fit in with what they could do as cheaply as possible (I doubt for instance that the Amiga design included 2x MOS CIA's before commodore bought Amiga Inc).

[Thorham]

In the real world, a million units is way larger than the actual market size, and ten thousand is more realistic (maybe still too large). Seeing how producing a relatively large quantity of units is not an option, those machines are going to turn out to be pretty expensive Makes you wish you were stinkin' rich

You're making too many assumptions to come up with a per unit cost of a re-production.  Do you really expect someone on this forum to research all the variables and give you a discrete price for a product that has no demand in the real world?  Or are you just asking a hypothetical question?

It should be possible to come up with a reasonable estimate

[freqmax]

How many people are there willing to pay for working Amiga hardware really?

I know it's hard to find hard numbers. But a educated guess based on statistical data?

[ferrellsl]

In the real world, a million units is way larger than the actual market size, and ten thousand is more realistic (maybe still too large). Seeing how producing a relatively large quantity of units is not an option, those machines are going to turn out to be pretty expensive Makes you wish you were stinkin' rich
It should be possible to come up with a reasonable estimate

Then by all means, be my guest.  Start your research and give all of us a reasonable estimate.   But I think the term "reasonable" is too subjective and any estimate will be just a ridiculous figure that won't be anywhere close to reality.

Your wealth would be better served by investing in a Replay board or a Minimig......or better yet, if you're so enamored with classic Amigas, just go out and buy some.  They're still pretty cheap on eBay and other places.

[freqmax]

Chips that need remanufacturing on the motherboard is M68k, ROM, Agnus, Denise, Paula, Gary, CIA. The rest is quite standard chips. So lets assume the circuit board with components cost 200 USD. Each mentioned chip will likely require 100k USD each. So the first amiga is likely to cost 700 200 USD. Divided by 10 000 sold units gives a unit price of 70 USD. Double chip cost and 1000 sold units gives a 1400 USD/unit price. etc..

So price estimate:
Unit price USD = (200 + 7*100 000) / (units)

[minator]

So price estimate:
Unit price USD = (200 + 7*100 000) / (units)

And what about tax and wages etc. etc. etc?


There is absolutely no point doing it that way these days.
It'd be far, far cheaper to cost reduce the minimig and do a bigger run of these.

Something more like Jeri's C64 in a joystick is much more likely to work and most importantly - actually sell in good numbers.

[freqmax]

And what about tax and wages etc. etc. etc?

Where is the tax and wages for Minimig?
So it would be impossible for a more ambitious project to do the same at circuit level?

There is absolutely no point doing it that way these days.

Ask @Digiman for the point of the exercise

It'd be far, far cheaper to cost reduce the minimig and do a bigger run of these.

I'd rather cost reduce FPGA Arcade

Something more like Jeri's C64 in a joystick is much more likely to work and most importantly - actually sell in good numbers.

These play joysticks are nice but quite limited.

[Digiman]

Jeez I just wanted an idea of cost today using every possible advance in cost reducing production/technology, as Sony and Microsoft frequently employ, to make a board with surface mounted AGA/OCS reproduction chipset for absolute minimum price.

I never said it was a viable business, it isn't, and 1 million unit is a realistic quantity in general for making a go of a new mass market piece of electronics. I never said the market potential = 1 million. 10k units doesn't give you true mass market product costs in the world of bespoke electronics.

You can run WinUAE to A4000/030 speeds on a complete AMD 1.6GHZ Mini-ITX motherboard today anyway for £90 retail, that's cheaper than Minimig, and both are simulating an Amiga.

To compare, if you ordered a 1 million minimig Chinese production run tomorrow how much could you get the price down to? Assume Peter Jones from Dragon's Den fronted the required cash advance regardless and forget market size. Remember this is about finding out absolute minimum production costs nothing more.

(This is the first thing any investor needs to know anyway, minimum cost is finite....market size is down to talent of marketing depts)

[freqmax]

Regarding the real purpose of this thread I found a photograph of the Motorola MC68020RC16 CPU die from a blog:



And from cpu-world.com Motorla 68000 die can be found. Neither of above photos are enough for decoding thoe.


FujiFilm S5100 (4.0 Mpix) with reversed Canon FD 50mm f1.4 lens on homemade macro stage, auto-focus mode, manual exposure, 2-second shutter delay

FujiFilm S6000fd (6.3 MPix) with macrolens Raynox M-250, camera settings same as above.

Some hints on photography and examples of various really microscopic objects.

[bloodline]

@Digiman

I think the point is, if you were to make an "Amiga Classic" compatible machine now, due to the complexity of the Amiga (when compared with machines of a similar age), to fully take advantage of technical advances and keep costs down... You would go the MiniMIG/Replay route rather than try and clone the original machine "chip for chip" (so to speak).

[Zac67]

Yes, it'd be a complete waste to reproduce everything 1:1 on chip level. Even with relative crude (today's) technology it'd be no problem to integrate everything into a single die - just like what C= started with Hombre. Whether you'd use an FPGA or ASIC approach is a matter of investment and volume.

[Digiman]

@Digiman

I think the point is, if you were to make an "Amiga Classic" compatible machine now, due to the complexity of the Amiga (when compared with machines of a similar age), to fully take advantage of technical advances and keep costs down... You would go the MiniMIG/Replay route rather than try and clone the original machine "chip for chip" (so to speak).

I agree, and chip reproduction is financially  only worth it for spares/repairs industry like the company in USA reproducing DeLoreans. They could build a new one from scratch but financially that's a dead end for same reasons.

I was interested in 2 things for comparison ie min technically possible cost for Minimig vs minimum possible cost for a 100% compatible non FPGA method. I know how much an x86 C-USA style x86 emulation based Amiga 600/1200 would cost.....very cheap.