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You are here: Home / Guest Appearance / #616 – Open Source Tapeout with Matthew Venn

#616 – Open Source Tapeout with Matthew Venn

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Welcome back to the show, Matthew Venn!

  • Matt was previously on Episode 467 from 2019 Supercon, before he started working on the open source toolchains and the education around them.
  • A bunch of news in the open source silicon space
    • Latest shuttle was MPW8, MPW9 coming up soon
    • 2 new open PDKs
  • Open source tools growing, much of it comes from Google “Willy Wonka-ing” process and sponsoring the shuttle
  • This was driven by past guest Tim Ansell (on 501)
  • Tim Edwards of efabless
  • Claire Wolf was on the show in the past
  • Dan Burke talked with Matt at Supercon 2023 about the term “Tapeout”
  • Matt runs the  ZeroToAsicCourse youtube channel, which includes a podcast.
  • Global Foundries / IHP open source
  • What is driving the growth?
    1. Open source tools
    2. Google MPW
    3. Open source PDK
    4. RISC V
  • Ming Zhang on The Amp Hour talking about chiplets with ZGlue (now defunct).
  • If you don’t get into the lottery, you can pay efabless $10K for 300 chips
  • Packaging is also tough
  • Volume problems – What happens between 300 chips and 10K chips?
  • Why should people get started with trying out the open source tools?
  • Why are people signing up for the couse?
    • 30-50% want to understand silicon
    • 20% are academic — many Universities are switching to the open source toolchain
    • 20-30% are commercial users who might want to use the info for
  • Reasons for going custom silicon as a business?
    • Security by obscurity
    • Space
    • Power
    • Sourcing (?)
  • MPW gives you about 10 sq mm
  • Matt put more designs onto his MPW slot, bundling even more designs (which has continued on)
  • OpenRAM
  • You could fit 25K of SRAM on 10 sq mm
  • #OpenSourceASICHighlight
  • Mohamed Kassem of eFabless was on the show in the past. eFabless highlights designs on their site.
  • Check out the 2022 highlight video from Matt!
  • Open Tapeout
  • FOSSI foundation runs the Latchup Conference
  • OSDA
  • India driving growth of chip design, many large scale companies also have verification teams in india
  • Security and “inspectability” from cloud companies
  • Root of trust chips – Laura from Oxide talked about this when she was on the show.
  • TSMC has an educational program for students in Taiwan
  • TinyTapeout
  • Extension of the course, joining designs together with a tristate bus
  • “Vosotros” is the “y’all” of the Spanish language
  • HDL is mostly controlled by the tools
  • OpenLane by eFabless was based on OpenRoad
  • TinyTapeout is meant for beginners
  • Uri from Wokwi (on show 599) worked with Matt on TinyTapeout
  • He added gates to Wokwi, which then can be connected together. The program pushes the gates out, which then can be synthesized.
  • You’re closer to the hardware with Wokwi than you will be with Verilog.
  • 500-600 standard cells in tiny tapeout
  • The Shuttle lottery is getting harder to win
  • There are more TinyTapeout slots
  • It costs $25 for design only, $100 for chips
  • When you get the chip back on a PCB, you select your design (or others!) with a DIP switch
  • Check out what was on the TinyTapeout 2nd run
  • Olof Kindgren won the Serv RISC V prize, which is a small bit serial processor. Past guest Greg Davill put that design onto TinyTapeout.
  • There is a Discord for the course
  • Siliwiz explains how silicon can work, allows you to use sliders to control how the silicon gate sizes change.
  • A wafer will take 6 months start to finish if all goes well.
  • MPW1-4 had a hold violation. Sylvain (TNT) who was also on episode 467 did some wizardry to get things working!
  • Siliwiz still not open to public
  • What does it take to tape out a design? Putting the logic inside of other logic when creating a wafer. Then eFabless takes care of the rest.
  • The harness with everything that allows you to access the low level IO is called “caravel”
  • Europractice is another IC service

Comments

  1. Tim 'mithro' Ansell says

    January 24, 2023 at 10:24 pm

    If you want to understand what is possible on 130nm process tech, take a look at the Google doc at https://j.mp/si130nm

    The “Cypress cy8c4245axi – PSoC 4200” was done on the SKY130 process technology and uses 2120 x 3210 μm (6.80 mm2) silicon area. It included;
    * Cortex-M0 CPU at up to 48 MHz
    * 32 KB flash
    * 4 KB SRAM
    * 36 GPIO pins (4 ports of 8 pins plus one half-port of 4 pins)
    * 2 comparators
    * 4 Universal Digital Blocks (UDBs, basically CPLD function blocks)

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