With learning being online, SHAKTI core and ‘vsdflow’ being opensource, this is first-time in the history of VLSI design & EDA (thanks to RISC-V ecosystem and Shakti Team at IITM lead by Prof. Kamakoti), a chip will ever be taped-out using all open source flow, which will cater to almost 80% Indian Semiconductor Market.
A simple chip frequency divider but most prominently used in counter modules of a microproceesor or as standalone IC can be completely designed from Verilog code to layout . A complete chip with IO pins and labels on it can be designed with help of efabless cloud based eda tool just like a commercial IC. There are two toolbox in efabless one is CloudV for Verilog or c code & other is Open Galaxy for backend design for designing commercial like IC with zero cost involved & same can be given to Semiconductor foundries for mass production. From Preparation , synthesis to DRC cleanup using Q flow manager a Core part of IC can be obtained with log files of each stage used in this process. A innovative feature of interactive DRC under Magic tool enables the designer to rectify DRC violations on the spot. Moreover, ESD protection is also available under Opengalaxy tool for use of chip in electrosensitive applications.
This blog is regarding abstract submission for VSDOpen2018, which is the first online conference in VLSI, that covers all aspects of semiconductor technology with prime focus to build SoC using RISC-V CPU by illustrating exciting ways using (only) opensource EDA tools.
Just to give you some background, picoSoC is an example SoC using PicoRV32, and PicoRV32 is a size-optimized RISC-V CPU which implements RV32IMC instruction set architecture.
We launched industry grade PNR EDA tool ‘Proton’ on web in front of 100 people across 7 countries, which I think, by far, has been a perfect launch for any partial open-source EDA tool.The below link has the details of the launch:
https://www.udemy.com/vsd-physical-design-webinar-using-eda-tool-proton/