Friday, June 11, 2004

The fine line between Genius and Insanity

I've figured out why nobody has come up with a true bitgrid yet...

The idea is insane

Everyone worries themselves sick trying to reduce either transistor count, power consumption, or signal delays. It's just plain nuts to put a signal through 100,000 extra gates, if you really don't need to. So, nobody would ever come up with the bitgrid.

I, on the other hand, saw the benefit of having a homogeneous grid with no restrictions on routing, which lead to the bitgrid concept. I was totally ignorant of the importance of keeping the transistor counts low, reducing the power consuption, and maximizing the efficiency of layout of a chip. Thus, I was too ignorant to know better

22 years have come and gone, and I'm dipping into the well to pull the concept back out. I've got a lot of life lessons learned, and have decided to get this thing built. I started doing the research, and reducing my ignorance of the subject. The realization last night of the truely awful state of the bitgrid concept was frightening. I thought I had just wasted a bit of time, and took a fair self-esteem hit.

This morning, I now see the bigger picture, and I'm comforted by it. I don't have to worry about competition, prior art, etc. I've learned quite a bit from this experience.

Now, all I have to do is figure out if it really genius to pass a signal through 100,000 transistors instead of a wire, to get the flexibility of a bitgrid. It'll take time and effort, but I'm going to make it happen.

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