#501 – Discussing the Open Source PDK with Tim Ansell

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Welcome back, Tim ‘Mithro’ Ansell!

• Tim has been on the show twice before:
  • 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
• Contact Tim directly: tansell@google.com
• Better to go on the slack and ask there