3 ms·

How did you learn the prerequisite solid state physics knowledge in order to fully understand the background behind the first two chapters? e.g. The actual mec

How did you learn the prerequisite solid state physics knowledge in order to fully understand the background behind the first two chapters? e.g. The actual mechanism by which an integrated circuit transforms input into useful output. I've never been able to find a solid explanation on how even the simplest real world integrated circuit, such as a TI SN7400, actually does that.

jon-wood 3y ago
The course explicitly states that it’s not a physics, or even really an electronics, course. It doesn’t go into the gritty details of how all this stuff works in the real world, just how once it does work you can string it all together to build a computer and then a virtual machine to run on it.
moritzwarhier 3y ago
I have only faint memories of my beginner's course on this topic at university, and absolutely no knowledge. Somehow I remember the word MOSFET. I think the wikipedia articles about logic gates should provide all necessary cross references. "Fully understand" is an elusive term though. How do you fully understand the solid-state physics of logic gates if you don't fully understand all of physics, chemistry, maybe even quantum mechanics... Not meaning to be dismissive though! I love to try to fully understand things and hate having to accept black box logic. But I also have to admit that I've given up on this approach for many things a long time ago. Skimming the course summary, it sounds as if this "Hardware Description Language" might mark the boundary of what this course is about. Makes sense, it's not "from physics to NAND", it's "from NAND to Tetris" :)
- froggit 3y ago
  The term "hardware description language" still gives me nightmares 5 years after my only experience working with them. Was working on my master's in an interdisciplinary CS/MIS/CompEng program for Cybersecurity and needed an elective. "Fundamentals of Computer Architecture" sounded kinda cool. I walk in on the first day not realizing that while I had done my undergrad in MIS (fun fact: this is a business degree), literally every person in the course was either on the last semester of their undergrad in CompEng or were grad students that already had a BS in CompEng (this school combined some undergrad/grad lectures). Suddenly i hear the teacher say like "grad students will also need to use an HDL and design a processor compatible with the basic MIPS instruction set." I started at "what's HDL mean?" Teacher responds "If that's a real question then it means: Hurry and Drop this Lecture." Day 1 and I already have the wrong questions for the wrong reasons. That was a really bad 3.5 months... But it's also proof that if you hate literally everything hard enough, then it is absolutely possible to pull a 100 day "zero to MIPS HDL prototyping" speedrun.
- FredPret 3y ago
  As frustrating as it is to black-box certain domains of knowledge, it’s an incredibly useful mental shortcut when used judiciously.
  - bigstrat2003 3y ago
    It's also just plain necessary as human knowledge gets more and more complex. The more time you spend on learning, the less time you have to actually make use of that knowledge. Ars longa, vita brevis.
jholman 3y ago
You're making a category error, I think. This books/course doesn't cover physics. It doesn't even cover signal stuff, like stuff about how fast the voltage levels stabilize, or even voltages at all. It's not "silicon wafer to Tetris" or "pile of protons and neutrons to Tetris" or "transistors to Tetris". You start with nand gates (and later also you get flipflops for free). This course would work equally well on nand gates made of carved wooden gears, or nand gates made with fluidic logic, or nand gates made by encoding the whole thing into O-gauge hobby railroads. If that's the level of explanation you seek, this book is incredible.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  > It's not "silicon wafer to Tetris"... That is a good point, I had just assumed that information was available somewhere online, but it doesn't seem likely.
  - amenghra 3y ago
    https://nandgame.com/ https://nandgame.com/ has a cmos level towards the end. It doesn’t explain the transistor-level physics but does let you play with things. The art of electronics book might be a good place to start if you want to learn the physical/electrical layer.
  - svnt 3y ago
    Something like this will at least get you conversant. You only need the first few chapters, and can skip BJTs. https://archive.org/details/microelectronicc00jaeg/page/n11/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/microelectronicc00jaeg/page/n11/...
  - alted 3y ago
    Lower-level teaching resources definitely exist! Here are my favorites: - The Zero to ASIC course (and Tiny Tapeout) [1] explains transistor circuits and teaches you an open source software stack---and you get a chip physically manufactured! You could make the Nand to Tetris computer in actual silicon (if you can get enough transistors). - To learn how things are manufactured on silicon wafers, get textbooks on microfabrication. A decent starting point is [2]. There's also a good video series [3] for a quick overview. - To understand how a single transistor or diode works, get textbooks on "semiconductor devices". A good starting point is the free online [4]. [1] https://www.zerotoasiccourse.com/ https://www.zerotoasiccourse.com/ https://tinytapeout.com/ https://tinytapeout.com/ [2] "Introduction to Microelectronic Fabrication" by Jaeger [3] https://siliconrun.com/our-films/silicon-run-1/ https://siliconrun.com/our-films/silicon-run-1/ [4] "Modern Semiconductor Devices for Integrated Circuits" by Chenming Hu, https://www.chu.berkeley.edu/modern-semiconductor-devices-for-integrated-circuits-chenming-calvin-hu-2010/ https://www.chu.berkeley.edu/modern-semiconductor-devices-fo...
wintogreen74 3y ago
The book is a great example of how we do pretty much everything with computers today: abstraction. You can definitely learn how a transistor works but this book/course explicitly starts with "you've got a NAND chip - GO!"
cdcarter 3y ago
Ben Eater does have a handful of early videos on his YouTube page that gave me a much better understanding of what's happening down at the physical and particle level. But at the end of the day, to succeed with this material you just need to understand the theoretically digital function of a transistor, not the physical properties.
kragen 3y ago
btw the sn7400 is already a fairly advanced ic; something like an uln2003 is closer to 'the simplest real world integrated circuit' probably the best place to start for this, in a top-down sequence, is the art of electronics by horowitz and hill. it explains how transistors and diodes act in §1.6, §2, and §3, initially explaining transistors with the simplified 'current amplifier' model (which already goes beyond the 'transistor switch' model you're thinking of), then quantitatively with the ebers–moll model; they're focused on how to use this information to design working circuits from discrete components you can put together on a circuit board. camenzind's designing analog chips (available free online) goes into how to use this information to design actual chips (not only does nand2tetris get into things like metastability and noise margin, the authors seem to be confused about what a chip even is, thinking you can make a chip by assembling other chips) but the ebers–moll model is still not solid-state physics knowledge. so far the best overview i've found of that is madou's 'fundamentals of microfabrication and nanotechnology' which has a couple of chapters about solid-state physics, going into the historical development of quantum mechanics. but it's not really a quantum mechanics textbook; it's just an overview that shows where quantum-mechanical knowledge fits into understanding solid-state physics 'the feynman lectures on physics' is the best quantum mechanics textbook i've found so far, but because my knowledge of quantum mechanics is even more minimal, please don't trust my recommendation on this hope this helps. good luck in your learning voyage!
- throwaway3090 3y ago
  I think pretty much every sophomore level microelectronics book starts at basic semiconductor physics, works that into pn junctions, then transistors, then amplifiers, then gates and sequential elements. A typical choice is Sedra & Smith https://learninglink.oup.com/access/sedra8e https://learninglink.oup.com/access/sedra8e But there is no shortage of choices.
  - kragen 3y ago
    sedra & smith is widely considered an excellent recommendation, but on skimming it, it seems that it does not cover solid-state physics at all or even mention any quantum effects; madou does spend a few chapters on solid-state physics, and of course feynman covers elementary quantum mechanics quite comprehensively. sedra & smith does go into a lot more depth on some aspects of chip design than horowitz & hill or even camenzind. it gives the ebers–moll equation in table 6.2, just not by name, and describes the inner workings of transistors in considerably more detail than the other books horowitz & hill, camenzind, and feynman are much better written than sedra & smith or madou. the quality of the writing in sedra & smith in particular is quite poor; it contradicts itself every few pages, and often says things that require great effort to interpret as a correct statement, at least in the 7th edition i'm looking at horowitz & hill also have much nicer schematics than sedra & smith or, especially, camenzind
1000100_1000101 3y ago
Aside from his basic 8-bit CPU, Ben Eater goes into how transistors work too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXvAlwMAxiA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXvAlwMAxiA . Once you've got transistors, his videos walk you through making gates. Once you've got gates, he switches to the 74xx series and builds a CPU.

jon-wood 3y ago

The course explicitly states that it’s not a physics, or even really an electronics, course. It doesn’t go into the gritty details of how all this stuff works in the real world, just how once it does work you can string it all together to build a computer and then a virtual machine to run on it.

moritzwarhier 3y ago

I have only faint memories of my beginner's course on this topic at university, and absolutely no knowledge. Somehow I remember the word MOSFET. I think the wikipedia articles about logic gates should provide all necessary cross references. "Fully understand" is an elusive term though. How do you fully understand the solid-state physics of logic gates if you don't fully understand all of physics, chemistry, maybe even quantum mechanics... Not meaning to be dismissive though! I love to try to fully understand things and hate having to accept black box logic. But I also have to admit that I've given up on this approach for many things a long time ago. Skimming the course summary, it sounds as if this "Hardware Description Language" might mark the boundary of what this course is about. Makes sense, it's not "from physics to NAND", it's "from NAND to Tetris" :)

froggit 3y ago
The term "hardware description language" still gives me nightmares 5 years after my only experience working with them. Was working on my master's in an interdisciplinary CS/MIS/CompEng program for Cybersecurity and needed an elective. "Fundamentals of Computer Architecture" sounded kinda cool. I walk in on the first day not realizing that while I had done my undergrad in MIS (fun fact: this is a business degree), literally every person in the course was either on the last semester of their undergrad in CompEng or were grad students that already had a BS in CompEng (this school combined some undergrad/grad lectures). Suddenly i hear the teacher say like "grad students will also need to use an HDL and design a processor compatible with the basic MIPS instruction set." I started at "what's HDL mean?" Teacher responds "If that's a real question then it means: Hurry and Drop this Lecture." Day 1 and I already have the wrong questions for the wrong reasons. That was a really bad 3.5 months... But it's also proof that if you hate literally everything hard enough, then it is absolutely possible to pull a 100 day "zero to MIPS HDL prototyping" speedrun.
FredPret 3y ago
As frustrating as it is to black-box certain domains of knowledge, it’s an incredibly useful mental shortcut when used judiciously.
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  It's also just plain necessary as human knowledge gets more and more complex. The more time you spend on learning, the less time you have to actually make use of that knowledge. Ars longa, vita brevis.

jholman 3y ago

You're making a category error, I think. This books/course doesn't cover physics. It doesn't even cover signal stuff, like stuff about how fast the voltage levels stabilize, or even voltages at all. It's not "silicon wafer to Tetris" or "pile of protons and neutrons to Tetris" or "transistors to Tetris". You start with nand gates (and later also you get flipflops for free). This course would work equally well on nand gates made of carved wooden gears, or nand gates made with fluidic logic, or nand gates made by encoding the whole thing into O-gauge hobby railroads. If that's the level of explanation you seek, this book is incredible.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
> It's not "silicon wafer to Tetris"... That is a good point, I had just assumed that information was available somewhere online, but it doesn't seem likely.
- amenghra 3y ago
  https://nandgame.com/ https://nandgame.com/ has a cmos level towards the end. It doesn’t explain the transistor-level physics but does let you play with things. The art of electronics book might be a good place to start if you want to learn the physical/electrical layer.
- svnt 3y ago
  Something like this will at least get you conversant. You only need the first few chapters, and can skip BJTs. https://archive.org/details/microelectronicc00jaeg/page/n11/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/microelectronicc00jaeg/page/n11/...
- alted 3y ago
  Lower-level teaching resources definitely exist! Here are my favorites: - The Zero to ASIC course (and Tiny Tapeout) [1] explains transistor circuits and teaches you an open source software stack---and you get a chip physically manufactured! You could make the Nand to Tetris computer in actual silicon (if you can get enough transistors). - To learn how things are manufactured on silicon wafers, get textbooks on microfabrication. A decent starting point is [2]. There's also a good video series [3] for a quick overview. - To understand how a single transistor or diode works, get textbooks on "semiconductor devices". A good starting point is the free online [4]. [1] https://www.zerotoasiccourse.com/ https://www.zerotoasiccourse.com/ https://tinytapeout.com/ https://tinytapeout.com/ [2] "Introduction to Microelectronic Fabrication" by Jaeger [3] https://siliconrun.com/our-films/silicon-run-1/ https://siliconrun.com/our-films/silicon-run-1/ [4] "Modern Semiconductor Devices for Integrated Circuits" by Chenming Hu, https://www.chu.berkeley.edu/modern-semiconductor-devices-for-integrated-circuits-chenming-calvin-hu-2010/ https://www.chu.berkeley.edu/modern-semiconductor-devices-fo...

wintogreen74 3y ago

The book is a great example of how we do pretty much everything with computers today: abstraction. You can definitely learn how a transistor works but this book/course explicitly starts with "you've got a NAND chip - GO!"

cdcarter 3y ago

Ben Eater does have a handful of early videos on his YouTube page that gave me a much better understanding of what's happening down at the physical and particle level. But at the end of the day, to succeed with this material you just need to understand the theoretically digital function of a transistor, not the physical properties.

kragen 3y ago

btw the sn7400 is already a fairly advanced ic; something like an uln2003 is closer to 'the simplest real world integrated circuit' probably the best place to start for this, in a top-down sequence, is the art of electronics by horowitz and hill. it explains how transistors and diodes act in §1.6, §2, and §3, initially explaining transistors with the simplified 'current amplifier' model (which already goes beyond the 'transistor switch' model you're thinking of), then quantitatively with the ebers–moll model; they're focused on how to use this information to design working circuits from discrete components you can put together on a circuit board. camenzind's designing analog chips (available free online) goes into how to use this information to design actual chips (not only does nand2tetris get into things like metastability and noise margin, the authors seem to be confused about what a chip even is, thinking you can make a chip by assembling other chips) but the ebers–moll model is still not solid-state physics knowledge. so far the best overview i've found of that is madou's 'fundamentals of microfabrication and nanotechnology' which has a couple of chapters about solid-state physics, going into the historical development of quantum mechanics. but it's not really a quantum mechanics textbook; it's just an overview that shows where quantum-mechanical knowledge fits into understanding solid-state physics 'the feynman lectures on physics' is the best quantum mechanics textbook i've found so far, but because my knowledge of quantum mechanics is even more minimal, please don't trust my recommendation on this hope this helps. good luck in your learning voyage!

throwaway3090 3y ago
I think pretty much every sophomore level microelectronics book starts at basic semiconductor physics, works that into pn junctions, then transistors, then amplifiers, then gates and sequential elements. A typical choice is Sedra & Smith https://learninglink.oup.com/access/sedra8e https://learninglink.oup.com/access/sedra8e But there is no shortage of choices.
- kragen 3y ago
  sedra & smith is widely considered an excellent recommendation, but on skimming it, it seems that it does not cover solid-state physics at all or even mention any quantum effects; madou does spend a few chapters on solid-state physics, and of course feynman covers elementary quantum mechanics quite comprehensively. sedra & smith does go into a lot more depth on some aspects of chip design than horowitz & hill or even camenzind. it gives the ebers–moll equation in table 6.2, just not by name, and describes the inner workings of transistors in considerably more detail than the other books horowitz & hill, camenzind, and feynman are much better written than sedra & smith or madou. the quality of the writing in sedra & smith in particular is quite poor; it contradicts itself every few pages, and often says things that require great effort to interpret as a correct statement, at least in the 7th edition i'm looking at horowitz & hill also have much nicer schematics than sedra & smith or, especially, camenzind

1000100_1000101 3y ago

Aside from his basic 8-bit CPU, Ben Eater goes into how transistors work too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXvAlwMAxiA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXvAlwMAxiA . Once you've got transistors, his videos walk you through making gates. Once you've got gates, he switches to the 74xx series and builds a CPU.