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.

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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

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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

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How about benchmarking Opensource openSTA against ——?

So, I took up two STA tools, OpenSTA from openroad project and “——-” from “——-“, to explain, to some extent, what “bench-marking” means to me. I would also encourage everyone reading this blog to come up with their definitions of “bench-marks” for other tools and we can model that. You can fill-up “——” with one of your favorite industry grade EDA tools. The concept of benchmark won’t change

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