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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
- 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!