German TechTuber Matthias ‘bitluni’ Balwierz has designed a “first of its kind” application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) which has a deviously humorous purpose. He got the ASIC manufactured via Tiny Tapeout, and the video below shows that plugging it into a display adapter results in an instant Rickroll.
Bitluni explains that his ASIC’s specific purpose was to display aRickroll animation. You can see it is quite a basic animation, and it is said to be based on an animated GIF with 32x32 pixels, which uses 512 bytes on the chip. In effect, thisASICis described as a ‘ROM’ that simply holds the data of an animation.
Shortly after the intro, the ASIC Bitluni designed is shown on a small carrier PCB, which is then attached to a VGA board – one of Bitluni’s previous electronics maker projects. Plugging this intoa monitorwill ‘surprise’ the victim with the infamous Rickroll animation.
Bitluni’s meme-silicon project was enabled by the Tiny Tapeout Program. He submittedthis Rickroll project, alongside some of his more serious silicon chip designs, to Matt Venn’sTiny Tapeout 2(TT2). The project provided 165 pieces of silicon real estate to contributors. You can see the Rickroll ASIC Bitluni designed highlighted in the first slide, below.
Elsewhere in the video, it is explained that everyone who was part of the TT2 program got the same chip and a manual with instructions to access any of the designs via the Caravel microcontroller wrapper for the user projects. Tiny Tapeout has a demo board with DIP switches making it easy to select and test any of the 165 projects. However, Bitluni wanted to make his project neater and therefore designed a dedicated PCB for the chip to make accessing his project a cinch.
There have been five Tiny Tapeout chip projects so far. you may read about them all, and find out about all the project submissions via the above linked TT2 page.Bitluni’s YouTube channelmay also be worth further investigation if you like this project and are interested in building similar projects, gadgets, and so on.
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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom’s Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
