this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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I may be hallucinating now, but I swear I remember nearly a decade ago there was a paper or articles about how CG PCBs were using some electrical tricks that were non standard to minimize space or something. The design purposefully had arcs or short circuits or something. Maybe it was a temperature thing? I did a more than cursory search and couldn't find much, but I vividly remember having conversations about it. Anyone remember anything like that?
There was a story about a researcher using evolving algorithms to build more efficient systems on FPGAs. One of the weird shortcuts was some system that normally used a clock circuit, but none was available, and it made a dead-end circuit the would give a electric pulse when used, giving it a makeshift clock circuit. The big problem was that better efficiency often used quirks of the specific board, and his next step was to start testing the results on multiple FPGAs and using the overall fitness to get past that quirk/shortcut.
Pretty sure this was before 2010. Found a possible link from 2001.
Yes, thank you! My timing was wrong (I'm getting old lol), but this was the exact thing being discussed. Glad other people were able to find the info.