The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

Welcome Michael Gielda of Antmicro and the CHIPS Alliance!

• We were introduced to Michael by past guest Tim Ansell
• Antmicro was a founding member of RISC V, which they first found out about at a workshop at CERN
• Open RISC
• Renode is “a simulator to build embedded systems faster”
• Antmicro is a service organization at their core (contract/consulting services)
• They built Renode for themselves
• Edge AI systems
• CI – Continuous Integration
• Can simulate internal and external peripherals for a chip and board
• Abstracting building blocks
• Renode allows users to put things together in a config file
• They have been described as “The Docker of embedded”, which Michael says isn’t quite true, but shows that Antmicro works within the concept of Containerization
• Using Chris’s ABC board as an example
• We had previously talked about a remote testing setup on episode 512, and how Renode would replace that setup
• Users load their compiled binary into Renode.
• What can you “see” inside Renode?
• Packet analyzer like Wireshark
• There wasn’t a way to produce trace data, so they built something that extracts it from the simulated processor
• The Renode 1.11 release has metrics analysis
• Trace tracking
• Modeling an accelerometer
• Renode Platform File
• Everything becomes a test vector
• TFlite – Tensor Flow Lite
• esting gesture recognition
• Pareto
• Removing the human factor from the loop
• Test driven development
• Antmicro is “trying to make hardware boring”
• Networking is tough. What if you want to work with a bunch of devices networked together? Renode allows you to simulate multiple high level devices (like a dev board) talking to one another over a simulated network.
• Testing packet loss
• How do you validate that the simulation represents reality?
• Base the simulation data on datasheet
• Most systems are only using 10% of the chip (system), in terms of all
• Currently integrated into arduino
• HDL simulation (transistor level) using Verilator
• SiFive – FireSim
• Closing the feedback loop
• Silicon vendors didn’t give what the software people want
• Security domain – Dover use case. People prototyping performance.
• Polarfire SOC
• LiteX
• Working with Quick Logic
• PDK shuttle runs closing
• Open Fabric 
• How do they decide on what to work on? “We look for things that are really broken and try to fix them”
• Working out in the open on CI for TF Lite
• “A society of tinkerers”
• CHIPS alliance aims to promote open source cores, interconect, and more…but also open source tooling
• It is a Linux Foundation project
• Intel AIB – developed the spec and code at the same time
• Would open source be possible in a place with vertical integration (ie Tesla), as we talked with Joris last week? “Open source achieves a common interface without the scale of Tesla”
• For more informtion, check out Antmicro.com
• Renode portable package
• Check out documentation
• One command to run the demo
• Looking for marketing people, but more broadly they are looking for people that believe in the mission of open source

Not discussed on the episode:

• Michael gave a talk/demo at FOSSi foundation

Many thanks to our Patrons! You can join at Patreon.com/TheAmpHour if you’d like to join the crowd. A special thanks to our corporate sponsor Binho, who now distribute the Sensepeek PCBite.