The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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!