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
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.
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.
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
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
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
@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
@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.
GitHub is the new Resume for VLSI industry
After 9-years of extensive research on VLSI students learning patterns and multiple 5-days workshop with students and professionals all over world, below image displays 6 critical components of a remarkably successful VSD workshop. I am measuring success in terms of placements, interviews, fundamentals revision and job changes by professionals.
