Chris Gammell and Dave Jones' voices span the chasm of thousands of miles each and every week to speak to each other and industry experts about where the field of electronics is moving. Whether it be a late breaking story about a large semiconductor manufacturer, a new piece of must-have test equipment or just talking through recent issues with their circuit designs, Chris and Dave try to make electronics more accessible for the listeners. Most importantly, they try and make the field of electronics more fun. Guests range from advanced hobbyists working on exciting new projects up through C-level executives at a variety of relevant and innovative companies. Tune in to learn more about electronics and then join the conversation! Visit The Amp Hour website for our back catalog of 150+ episodes.
First time was talking about microcontroller and making a device out of that
Second time was talking about FPGAs
Third time is looking at creating the ASIC
Tim says the next level down will be making the actual chips like Sam Zeloof, but he prefers bits to atoms.
Talk at Chaos with Bunnie about dabbling in the others’ fields, like thinking about the lifetime of software (and applying quality engineering)
What is an open source PDK? Github repo
Three main components to building an IC
The RTL and design (code)
The tools – compiler / interpreter in SW
How does the physics work?
Called the PDK – process design kit
In machine readable form
Similar to the stackup of a PCB
Tim likes the tool SKiDL by past guest Dave Vandenbout.
Mike Englehardt has been on before talking about SPICE.
Why were PDKs secret before? Especially since it would be very hard to reverse engineer the PDK
In the 80s it was open, but it changed over time. Chris posits because of VC investment? Now it’s cultural that the chip industry is not open
“Open source has won in the sofware world” and the arguments feel the same
QuickLogic officially supporting their tools with open source tools, as stated in a blog post by CEO Brian Faith
We are still taking entries to win a board from episode 500
RISC V ISA (instruction set architecture)
“The secret power of open source means engineers don’t have to spend time talking to lawyers”
Open source standardizes legal equations
The ASIC world has many groups of lawyers
Only ideas that people are extremely confident about will get explored
Moore’s law slowing down, compute needs growing
Taking risks is hard because of all the roadblocks
RISC V has opened up the ISA space to try exploring ideas that others had written off as bad ideas
Tim gave a FOSSi “Dial Up” talk, which we will refer to at different timestamps to discuss the slides he reviews.
Single core has flattened out for 10 years (7 minute mark on the video)
More cores needs more memory bandwidth
Power consumption issues
Tim is in a group the focuses on developer productivity at Google
That’s why they’re contributing to tools to make things faster
Security is also dependent upon how fast you can deploy changes
Making hardware accelerators using TPUs
Using machine learning to develop TPU
130 nm came out in 99 (26 minute mark)
The PDK and resulting silicon will be used for areas where cost > performance, like IoT.
Good for microcontroller, but not a high speed
Beagleboard has PRUs
They expect some users will make specialized devices, like putting a RISC V per pin or similar.
What’s the plan for analog?
First thing released was digital standard cells, but they plan to publish low level transistor models, including parametric models. Unfortunately they are currently blocked on getting that work released.
What tools are available?
Similar to FPGA toolchain sides
First step for FPGA and ASIC is synthesis, like using Yosys (lead by Claire Wolf)
P&R is different
More freedom in ASICs
QFlow ASIC PNR (Tim Edwards)
FPGA PNR are different toolchains:
NextPNR (lead by Dave Shah)
VPR (grandfather of Quartus 2)
DARPA launched a program called IDEA (Andreas Olofsson), which resulted in another PNR for ASICs: The Open Road project
Tools for doing an open source flow
Submitted list by sine_osc
Magic (older than the BSD license!)
KLayout
SPICE
Xyce is fast
LTSpice used by LT designers
Schematic capture is still not easy (maybe KiCad?)
Google will be doing a free shuttle run for open source chips
Will be sending it to eFabless, they will bundle the shuttle
40 designs total (unless they get a large response)
Wafer chip scale package (CSP) 4x4mm
50 i/o, 40 will be for design
Might send back chips on castellated PCB
To get your design approved, it must be using the right license.
They will release a full list of licenses that will work, but Apache2 is guaranteed.
Also needs to pass DRC, which will be published in the repo soon.
Skywater PDK slack channel
Lottery system if they get more than 40 designs
Will be starting first run in Mid-November, Will be doing more runs after that.
Out of 16 mm^2, only 10 mm^2 is available. The rest will be for “the harness”, a RISC V processor that can connect ‘virtual GPIO’ to turn things on or off.
As a reference for size, could probably fit 10 RISC V cores on the 10 mm^2
In contrast to MOSIS or Europractice, they want to fab out 100 – 400 of the chips so that they can share.
Slack channel skywater-pdk
J-Core, an SH based processor
Power PC is now an open ISA
Tim has published an Inspiration document.
If you’re interested, you should join the mailing lists, especially the announce one.
The slack invite link is on the announce list. They will try to set up an invite bot for later.
Check out the FOSSi dial up talk series for future information about development.
Mohammed from eFabless will be giving a talk about Open Road and will be showcasing demo chips, which are currently out for manufacturing. These might act as good templates.
Need tutorials on all of the software (KLayout, MAGIC)
Project from University of Michigan, FASoC, treats analog design like digital design.
“Screaming inside their heart”
Craig Bishop episode
Adrian Tang episode
The physics act more ideally in the small space of silicon
Hoping to have a similar OSHpark for silicon
“Chips4makers” is one that is trying to make “the OSH Park for ASICs”, but they are more focused on retrocomputing.
Trying to seed and build an ecosystem
“The things that will be most successful in this space will be those that build on each other and work together”
Traditional ASIC designers should be prepared to do thing differntly
Can open source be profitable? IBM bought Red Hat for $30B
The next wave of software is “software AND”, the hardware is just a means to an end