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#650 – Accessible ASICs with Andreas Olofsson
Welcome back, Andreas Olofsson of ZeroASIC!
- Andreas was on the show back in 2015 (ep 254) talking about the Parallela, a crowdfunded parallel calcuation board by his then-company Adapteva
- What is enabling more open source to happen?
- Unit economics really impact silicon designs
- Open source effects have been having a positive effect on the industry. Andreas maintains a meta repo of 400 tools.
- Fewer fabs than 2008, mask sets still expensive
- Semiconductor singularity
- Andreas is deep into the world of “chiplets”
- This is the basis of his new company ZeroASIC
- Before he started that he was a director at a little outfit called DARPA
- Andreas focused on lowering costs, with the idea that 3 people should be able to design a chip
- He worked under Bill Chappell, the director of the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO)
- OpenROAD
- POSH
- CHIPS
- TinyTapeout
- Andrew Kang UCSD
- Chiplets
- We had Ming Zhang on to tlk about ZGlue, but that was a slightly different architecture
- What is a chiplet?
- AXI on chip
- SERDES
- Types of interconnect
- Organic
- Types of output
- SIP, Chip, SOM
- ZeroASIC is Andreas’ latest company
- They started by releasing a Silicon compiler project
- New thing is take system customers and build them an ASIC
- Optimizing speed and cost
- Mostly targeting aerospace and defense
- Try it out yourself on the ZeroASIC emulation page
- Their main processor is a Quadcore RISC V
- There are no off the shelf chiplets
- eFabric Active Interposer
- Defining a standard
- arm made a standard called amba
- AIB from Intel was opensourced
- Getting external contributors (hardware vs software)
- LatchUp – Fossi
- Personal passion drives people to contribute
- You’re really buying a datasheet from a big company
- Loading the design to AWS
- Check out the ZeroASIC openings
- Read about how ZeroASIC is democratizing chip making