Microelectronics for schoolchildren from the very beginning
A few years ago I had a chance to try my hand at luring inquisitive youths into the development of microelectronics. And then it was, as in the well-known proverb: “The claw is stuck - to the abyss of a bird!” I could not stop anymore. I want to share this experience with the public, maybe other electronics engineers will also want to do something similar. Literate people - better life.
It all started with the fact that we almost accidentally agreed with the Interregional Computer School in Dubna, near Moscow, to hold for them a kind of lecture on microprocessor design. This topic is known to me firsthand, for two decades I have been cooking in it. I had a chance to work in both domestic and foreign firms. Well, why not tell teenagers what the work of engineers who invent the insides of “proc” consists in. This is not among the same bore at a conference to speak - in front of children simply ottarabanit text will not work. If they are not interested at all, then they don’t care about honorary gray hair, brilliant bald heads and puffy cheeks. They will yawn, not hesitating, and fidget on the chairs, hoping to escape as soon as possible. But there are also pluses - all sorts of liberties, jokes, inaccuracies and simplifications will not cause resentment and demands to burn the heretic-speaker. In general, judging by the number of questions in the process of communication, the first pancake was not a lump, it became interesting to move on.
And then, after a similar class with students and teachers, already in the Goto Camp, an idea arose to give the children to try various “spare parts” for processors on the breadboard and to feel them live. Fortunately in the camp, among the various programmers there was also a den of robotics, who could get hold of chips, wires, LEDs and buttons. Such an approach is a thousand times better than looking at charts and diagrams on paper. Seeing with your own eyes how zeroes and units run inside the circuit, poke the logic gates with your finger - what could be more reliable for mastering the material? And then they program their microcontrollers like black boxes, without any idea what those inside are rustling about. And even the FPGAs do not solve the problem of making the electronics visual. Well, the child wrote a logical function on Verilog, well, I downloaded it through the programmer inside - the result is the same, all the logic is hidden in the depths of the chip. Therefore - only the valves. And even better - transistors.
')
The set of “crumbling”, available in the camp at the time of the illumination, was not rich. But the main thing - he was. It was necessary on this base to invent something that could blink invitingly with lights or something to buzz. The situation was complicated by the fact that I had a theoretical conversation about microprocessors and went to my home 50 km from the camp. That is, I was here, and the details - there.
Therefore, with one of the teachers had to arrange television sessions. I invented schemes, drew them on blotters and sent photos to him. And he tried to disassemble this cuneiform, assemble it on a breadboard and achieve proper operation. I described the result in response messages, and I tried to determine the cause of the problems and glitches in order to eliminate them. Surprisingly, in the end, we still managed to defeat two schemes: an address decoder and a multiplexer. It was not yet clear how the children would like it, but there was already something to show them.
In the camp, a survey was arranged whether there were any who wished to attend no longer a lecture, but a workshop with a laboratory on the operation of digital chip internals. There were a dozen brave fifteen-year-olds who were not afraid to try to understand the material, which, by the way, is usually told in the third year of the institute. It was immediately clear that the presentation should be to hell to exclude TTL, ECL and other mossy types of logic, with which professors caulk the brain to jellies. Only CMOS, only mainstream! At one's own risk and risk there included explanations of the principles of operation of MOS transistors in digital circuits. But without the physics of semiconductors and other horrors.
Here is a lyrical digression to those who scold modern youth for laziness and stupidity. Suppose they do not bay, that's what. We have a normal youth, do not listen to the old grumblers, boys and girls. Lyrical retreat is over.
The children so cleverly grabbed the material, after explanations and examples they boldly went out to the blackboard installed directly on the lawn under the open sky, and painted on the truth tables the valves at the transistor level - that was fine. Then together on these gates we “invented” an adder, a decoder and a multiplexer. And after that - tadam! - teacher and kind wizard Alexey delivered mockups with the results of our telemedications with him. This caused some excitement among the listeners - you can touch what was just drawn on the blackboard with felt-tip pens, and press the buttons, watching the switching of the LEDs on the outputs. At the same time, the best remark was: “Aaaaa, now I understood where almost all the wires from the laboratory had gone!”
After that, the children asked a lot of questions about electronics. I, fortunately, had enough qualifications to answer them. Except for one thing: "And where to read about what you told?" But there is no place. The old Soviet books, according to which we soldered our color music and radio sets, are outdated in terms of the “numbers”. Institutional primers with their formulas will discourage any desire to study electronics. There is a beautiful book of Harris, but there are no experiments on the breadboard. There are excellent component sets with dummies, but there are usually no detailed explanations of how all these devices work. Again I had to leave with a feeling, as if I had not completed something.
As you know, if you are not satisfied with what is, not Noah, but do it yourself, as you see fit. I had to sit down to write and publish a practical course for intelligent schoolchildren. To do this, of course, it took to buy parts, breadboard, wires and start playing home work. Suddenly it turned out to be terribly exciting.
For example, the game “who is faster” on two MOS transistors:
We then collected this game on a printed circuit board with a junior pupil, and it aroused a keen interest among his schoolmates, who excitedly pressed buttons for a whole week during the breaks, putting their smartphones aside. Who is there saying that children can’t be dragged away from the phones? Well, the hero of the soldering iron and rosin demanded to come up with something else, so that you can hit the comrades.
And this is the XOR (exclusive OR) gate on a dozen transistors:
But this is a D-trigger, triggered by level (trigger-latch). The ideas of memorizing and storing data are perfectly worked out on it:
Having dealt with the work of all types of logic gates at the transistor level, you can go to the low-degree integrated circuits of the CD4000 series. There will be no miracles and magic in their work after messing around with the transistors on the breadboard. Here, for example, the full adder:
But do not believe the layout of RAM. He, of course, poor - four registers of two bits. But it is an honest memory with address decoders, bit buses, storage cells and other nodes and wires, at each point of which you can stick with a probe probe and see the running of zeros and ones according to the scheme, disassemble reading and writing data on the illuminated and dying LEDs .
In total, the new version of the course for the summer school, there are three dozen schemes, entertainment and educational, which sequentially from one transistor to a dozen chips help children learn digital electronics, even without knowing how to program.
In general, today's high school students are right on the teeth of mastering the intricacies of designing computer hardware from the lowest level. There is nothing there that is inaccessible to an inquiring mind with modern components and capabilities. It is hoped that it will be possible to expand and deepen the promotion of microelectronic values ​​among the population.
It all started with the fact that we almost accidentally agreed with the Interregional Computer School in Dubna, near Moscow, to hold for them a kind of lecture on microprocessor design. This topic is known to me firsthand, for two decades I have been cooking in it. I had a chance to work in both domestic and foreign firms. Well, why not tell teenagers what the work of engineers who invent the insides of “proc” consists in. This is not among the same bore at a conference to speak - in front of children simply ottarabanit text will not work. If they are not interested at all, then they don’t care about honorary gray hair, brilliant bald heads and puffy cheeks. They will yawn, not hesitating, and fidget on the chairs, hoping to escape as soon as possible. But there are also pluses - all sorts of liberties, jokes, inaccuracies and simplifications will not cause resentment and demands to burn the heretic-speaker. In general, judging by the number of questions in the process of communication, the first pancake was not a lump, it became interesting to move on.
And then, after a similar class with students and teachers, already in the Goto Camp, an idea arose to give the children to try various “spare parts” for processors on the breadboard and to feel them live. Fortunately in the camp, among the various programmers there was also a den of robotics, who could get hold of chips, wires, LEDs and buttons. Such an approach is a thousand times better than looking at charts and diagrams on paper. Seeing with your own eyes how zeroes and units run inside the circuit, poke the logic gates with your finger - what could be more reliable for mastering the material? And then they program their microcontrollers like black boxes, without any idea what those inside are rustling about. And even the FPGAs do not solve the problem of making the electronics visual. Well, the child wrote a logical function on Verilog, well, I downloaded it through the programmer inside - the result is the same, all the logic is hidden in the depths of the chip. Therefore - only the valves. And even better - transistors.
')
The set of “crumbling”, available in the camp at the time of the illumination, was not rich. But the main thing - he was. It was necessary on this base to invent something that could blink invitingly with lights or something to buzz. The situation was complicated by the fact that I had a theoretical conversation about microprocessors and went to my home 50 km from the camp. That is, I was here, and the details - there.
Therefore, with one of the teachers had to arrange television sessions. I invented schemes, drew them on blotters and sent photos to him. And he tried to disassemble this cuneiform, assemble it on a breadboard and achieve proper operation. I described the result in response messages, and I tried to determine the cause of the problems and glitches in order to eliminate them. Surprisingly, in the end, we still managed to defeat two schemes: an address decoder and a multiplexer. It was not yet clear how the children would like it, but there was already something to show them.
In the camp, a survey was arranged whether there were any who wished to attend no longer a lecture, but a workshop with a laboratory on the operation of digital chip internals. There were a dozen brave fifteen-year-olds who were not afraid to try to understand the material, which, by the way, is usually told in the third year of the institute. It was immediately clear that the presentation should be to hell to exclude TTL, ECL and other mossy types of logic, with which professors caulk the brain to jellies. Only CMOS, only mainstream! At one's own risk and risk there included explanations of the principles of operation of MOS transistors in digital circuits. But without the physics of semiconductors and other horrors.
Here is a lyrical digression to those who scold modern youth for laziness and stupidity. Suppose they do not bay, that's what. We have a normal youth, do not listen to the old grumblers, boys and girls. Lyrical retreat is over.
The children so cleverly grabbed the material, after explanations and examples they boldly went out to the blackboard installed directly on the lawn under the open sky, and painted on the truth tables the valves at the transistor level - that was fine. Then together on these gates we “invented” an adder, a decoder and a multiplexer. And after that - tadam! - teacher and kind wizard Alexey delivered mockups with the results of our telemedications with him. This caused some excitement among the listeners - you can touch what was just drawn on the blackboard with felt-tip pens, and press the buttons, watching the switching of the LEDs on the outputs. At the same time, the best remark was: “Aaaaa, now I understood where almost all the wires from the laboratory had gone!”
After that, the children asked a lot of questions about electronics. I, fortunately, had enough qualifications to answer them. Except for one thing: "And where to read about what you told?" But there is no place. The old Soviet books, according to which we soldered our color music and radio sets, are outdated in terms of the “numbers”. Institutional primers with their formulas will discourage any desire to study electronics. There is a beautiful book of Harris, but there are no experiments on the breadboard. There are excellent component sets with dummies, but there are usually no detailed explanations of how all these devices work. Again I had to leave with a feeling, as if I had not completed something.
As you know, if you are not satisfied with what is, not Noah, but do it yourself, as you see fit. I had to sit down to write and publish a practical course for intelligent schoolchildren. To do this, of course, it took to buy parts, breadboard, wires and start playing home work. Suddenly it turned out to be terribly exciting.
For example, the game “who is faster” on two MOS transistors:
We then collected this game on a printed circuit board with a junior pupil, and it aroused a keen interest among his schoolmates, who excitedly pressed buttons for a whole week during the breaks, putting their smartphones aside. Who is there saying that children can’t be dragged away from the phones? Well, the hero of the soldering iron and rosin demanded to come up with something else, so that you can hit the comrades.
And this is the XOR (exclusive OR) gate on a dozen transistors:
But this is a D-trigger, triggered by level (trigger-latch). The ideas of memorizing and storing data are perfectly worked out on it:
Having dealt with the work of all types of logic gates at the transistor level, you can go to the low-degree integrated circuits of the CD4000 series. There will be no miracles and magic in their work after messing around with the transistors on the breadboard. Here, for example, the full adder:
But do not believe the layout of RAM. He, of course, poor - four registers of two bits. But it is an honest memory with address decoders, bit buses, storage cells and other nodes and wires, at each point of which you can stick with a probe probe and see the running of zeros and ones according to the scheme, disassemble reading and writing data on the illuminated and dying LEDs .
In total, the new version of the course for the summer school, there are three dozen schemes, entertainment and educational, which sequentially from one transistor to a dozen chips help children learn digital electronics, even without knowing how to program.
In general, today's high school students are right on the teeth of mastering the intricacies of designing computer hardware from the lowest level. There is nothing there that is inaccessible to an inquiring mind with modern components and capabilities. It is hoped that it will be possible to expand and deepen the promotion of microelectronic values ​​among the population.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/445006/
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