OKAD II (Oh CAD Two)

Visit Chuck Moore's Website for the real story on OKAD II

OKAD II, pronounced Oh CAD Two, is the latest VLSI design environment done by the inventor of Forth, Charles Moore. For the first time OKAD is written in Forth. For the first time OKAD provides chip descriptions in Forth. Chip component descriptions are now encapsulated in a few lines of Forth code. The descriptions of the chips themselves are now incredibly short.

Chuck is no longer saying that the map is not the territory. He now has the fastest Forth he has ever done instantly compiling complex chips from tiny descriptions in Forth. OKAD began as an experiment in sourceless programming. It got source code over the years and became the host of Chuck's first Color Forth that was used as a scripting language in his CAD environment. The latest Color Forth is the OS and hosts the new CAD package. The CAD package has new 3D views of chip enhanced by the 3D accelerator in the video card.

The system moves from the text description of the chip in Forth to the high resolution 3D view of the simulated chip instantly. Chip compilation from source code is now instantaneous, or at least was less than a tenth of second and I couldn't see it.

The latest chip I saw simulated in the CAD system was also amazing.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this system is not that it is so much faster, or simpler or more accurate than other systems, or that it can specify and simulate faster chips from a simpler high level description, I think the most amazing thing is that Chuck might release it into the public domain one of these days. It is a remarkable example of the power of Forth programming and an incredibly powerful tool.

Mr. Moore has been designing Forth chips for fifteen years and has been working with his own VLSI CAD design tools for a decade. For more information on the early versions of OKAD

Posted: 3/18/01

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page created 03/18/01
page updated 07/01/01