GoKawiilDave Plummer builds custom RAM board for 1970 PDP-11 using AI-assisted design
Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer, prompted by the high cost of memory for his vintage PDP-11, designed a standalone RAM card using ChatGPT and the EasyEDA circuit simulator despite lacking prior experience with such projects. The board uses a Lattice MachXO2 FPGA as a memory controller linked to four ISSI 1MB memory chips, and was tested on a backplane with an M8190 CPU board. He hit setbacks including inexperience flashing FPGA chips and the PDP-11's quirky word-based memory bus, which required careful handling of byte-lane selection during reads and writes.