Blogs – Page 3 – VLSI System Design

150+ students have decided to upskill in VLSI

And that’s where VSD must play an especially important role to bring in latest and greatest VLSI skills to you, atleast in the field of open-source hardware. VSD owes a lot to VLSI community and hence has planned 3 exclusive cloud lab-based VLSI workshops on 3 important topics, with top 3 expert instructors from around globe, having more than 2 decades of experience – Tim Edwards, Steve Hoover, and Prof. Mohamed Shalan

Open-source EDA tool development with lab exercises using Sky130 pdk’s by Google/Skywater
RISC-V micro-architecture using transaction level – Verilog with lab exercises on Makerchip Platform
SoC and Physical Design using Automated RTL2GDS OpenLANE tool with lab exercises using demo design and Sky130 pdk’s.

India’s ESDM and World’s open-source vision

All the people whom you see in below image were a part of VSD 8-week Research IP design internship program, all interns are from colleges in India, and all of them built some cool analog IP’s from scratch. This internship program partially and unknowingly executes India’s ESDM vision and World’s open-source vision, all by college students, who passionately worked close to 14-15hours per day

8th mile-stone – A story of 2kbps line and 8x clock multiplier

VSD Research IP design 8-week internship were a series of stories about people and students reaching great heights, using available resources. Thanks to Pandemic, every VSD student from every corner of the world realized the power of open-source EDA for VLSI learning/trainings.

7th mile-stone in open-source analog IP design – 10-bit DAC

Ashutosh had joined our VSD Research IP design internship group 8-weeks back, along with 30 other interns. His journey on was from “I can’t, its too difficult” to “I did it”. Personally, only I know how hard it was for him when he saw an industry grade 10-bit DAC specifications on VSD IP website. We managed to achieve post-layout DNL of 3.5LSB and INL of 3.7LSB, which as per experience, is really tough for a fresher to achieve in a span of 8-weeks, but not impossible.

6th mile-stone in field of open-source – FREE VLSI tool installation course

A full-fledged video lectures on step-by-step process to install OpenLANE EDA tool chain and Sky130 PDK open-process on your own laptop, from scratch. There is a dependency on vsdflow, though for fresh users and with Windows or fresh Unix machines. To do something like this, it needs a clear focus on end vision, with very good VLSI fundamentals, which demands hours of efforts every day

5th mile-stone in field of open-source – another compact SRAM

This time its @Reuel did a pretty great job of building a pretty compact 6T-SRAM cell and he is just a third year engineering student

4th mile-stone – 35 RISC-V cores in 5-days – Can you believe it?

We had Makerchip IDE, TL-Verilog, Day wise Slack channels, Classroom GitHub and VSD-IAT – All of them so seamlessly integrated that every participant followed the loop and there you go. Out of 110 participants, 35 participants built entire basic RISC-V CPU core which is close to 30% participants, and all in 5-days

3rd mile-stone in 1-week in field of open-source – 4kB SRAM design

@Yash joined our research project group under VSD Research internship program which runs for 8-weeks. He was supposed to explore openRAM memory compiler flow, develop all custom cells required by openRAM using OSU180nm and generate 4kB SRAM with an access time of 2.5ns

2nd mile-stone in field open-source (open-lane EDA + Google/Sky130)

@Nickson joined our research project group under VSD Research internship program which runs for 8-weeks. He was supposed to develop flow for standard cell design and characterization using all open-source tools – magic/ngspice, then plug those standard cells into open-source PNR flow by open-lane, and benchmark RTL2GDS flow results. This needed a knowledge, not only of PNR, but device physics, custom layout, DRC/LVS and then (finally) Physical design/STA.

Mixed-signal PNR flow using openlane/sky130nm process

GitHub is the new Resume for VLSI industry