HPR4333: A Radically Transparent Computer Without Complex VLSI

Hacker Public Radio

TITLE A Radically Transparent Computer Without Complex VLSI VENUE 1st IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy CyberInfrastructure for IoT and Microelectronics (SaTC 2025), Wright State University, February 25-27, 2025. This is a recording of the final rehearsal that occurred three hours before this invited talk. No slides were used. ABSTRACT Foreign adversaries have colonized America’s computers from at least 1986. Four decades later, online safety is the largest failure in the history of human engineering. Radical stewardship in cybersecurity would bring radical progress, but responsibility for losses will need to flow from the bottom up. The buck stops with victims, who must accept all blame for cyberattacks. Only then will people at risk properly vet the products and vendors they select. A leading challenge in stewardship is balancing the opaque, proprietary nature of VLSI complex logic with the owner’s need for complete control. Since these aspects are incompatible and owner control is essential, it’s necessary to design computers that avoid complex VLSI entirely. One such architecture, Dauug | 36, is being developed at Wright State University to deliver 36-bit computing, preemptive multitasking, paged virtual memory, and hundreds of opcodes, all without using a single microprocessor or anything like one. BIOGRAPHY Marc Abel is an engineer-scientist specializing in technology that supports civil rights, economic security, and geopolitical stability. He holds a 1991 B.S. in Engineering and Applied Science (focused on computer science) from Caltech, and a 2022 Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from Wright State University. Marc is the sole inventor, architect, implementer, maintainer, documenter, and promoter of the Dauug | 36 open-source minicomputer for critical infrastructure. He is the original and still only author of Dauug | 36’s firmware, designer and implementer of Dauug | 36’s assembly language and assemblers, writer of several related software tools, especially open-source electronic design automation and simulation tools, and the sole author of Osmin, a real-time operating system (RTOS) kernel for the architecture. He is the writer of 200,000 words of system documentation, including his dissertation and its online continuation called The Dauug House.