The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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#547 – Open Source Mindset with Michael Gielda


Welcome back, Michael Gielda of Antmicro!

  • Michael was on episode 519 talking about simulating embedded hardware using Renode
  • He returned to talk about other projects that Antmicro is working on, especially those that are open source. The open source projects are indexed on the Antmicro Open Source Portal.
  • Very niche stuff might be closed source, but people are surprised by what others might be interested in (if it were open sourced)
  • Renode was the topic of our last interview
  • AI is a new target of open source work. Antmicro recently released the Kenning framework
  • Why another standard? Relevant XKCD
  • Testing & benchmarking different AI models/frameworks across platforms from different vendors e.g. Nvidia, Modivius or Google Coral
  • Black boxes are bad for users
  • LLVM has hundreds of people looking at the project
  • CHIPS Alliance
  • Brian Faith from QuickLogic,first ever FPGA vendor to adapt open source flow
  • Sammy Cheung from Efinix
  • Interchange format for FPGA tooling
  • Virtex Ultrascale PCIe
  • What happens when a proprietary licensed company goes bankrupt?
  • Renode is being used for pre-silicon SoC development
  • Covered Renode-based CI’s in previous episode
  • Open source toolchain stuff
  • RISC-V: The ISA is common, but the cores are different.
  • What is the center of gravity in the RISC V world? Many people are using SiFive.
  • SiFive uses Chisel
  • ETH Zurich – another center of gravity – cores written in SystemVerilog
  • Place for diversity
    • Chisel (e.g. Antmicro’s DMA core)
    • SystemVerilog – enabling use of SystemVerilog code in open source tools
    • UVM – Universal Verification Methodology – recent progress with dynamic scheduling in Verilator
    • Migen
  • Zephyr bluetooth
  • Abstraction as a response to chip shortage
  • What if you wanted to do a fully open source flow? Let’s do a contrived security camera design example:
    • Xilinx 7 series or Lattice ECP5 or Crosslink-NX
    • Open source HWhw board using the Nvidia Jetson, manufactured by past guest Chris Osterwood
    • VexRiscv
    • Linux + LiteX
    • LiteDRAM
    • Ethernet core – everything but the phy
    • Co simulate with Verilator
    • Renode
  • Episodes for open source toolchain
    • Tim
    • Claire
    • Piotr
  • Cutting down on iteration
  • Chris mentions a past job that had 6 hour build cycles
  • Accelerating workflows using compute power and parallelizing dev processes
  • Working with GCP & building custom self-hosted GitHub runners
  • Chip design using AI (Google)
  • Scalenode
  • ARVSOM
  • BeagleV
  • DC-SCM FPGA-based board management controller
  • Open Compute Project
  • Row Hammer
  • Interested in working with Antmicro? Get in touch!


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 June 29, 2021  1h28m