Tom Spyrou is a long time EDA developer who has worked at large and small companies. In 1988 Developed QTV at VLSI technology. It was the first STA engine to be trusted to sign off devices for fabrication without timing based simulation. He was the original architect of PrimeTime STA algorithm. Manager of Cadence Common timing Engine and precursor to Open Access Senior technical positions at Synopsys, Cadence, Simplex, AMD, Altera and Intel.

I’m very pleased to get OSHWA certification for my ASIC clock. Who knows, maybe this is a world first! The clock was submitted as part of MPW1. We’re expecting silicon back in August/September, so it was time to get the PCB ready and try to source the other components! I started off by forking Sam Littlewood’s carrier board. This is a 4 layer board, but as I don’t need all the signals I was able to get it down to 2 layers for cheaper fabrication.

One of the popular types of entries to MPW1 & 2 have been FPGAs. I have previously spoken with Arya Reais-Parsi about their FPGA project submitted to MPW1. In MPW2 I noticed there were a couple of applications that seemed fairly advanced - especially FuseRISC: 2 RISCV processors with embedded FPGA fabric between them. Dirk & Nguyen kindly allowed me to interview them about: their FABulous eFPGA framework, support for Yosys & NextPNR, parameterisation of the fabric, blockrams with OpenRAM, their MPW applications and previous tape-outs, and their experience with the open source tools.

After 6 months, 90 participants and 14 designs submitted to MPW2, I’m making the Zero to ASIC course even better! One of the things that’s great about the course is that you can proceed at your own pace. I originally set the course length at 6 weeks, but a lot of people want more time than this. To resolve this I have: removed the expiry date on the discord support, removed the expiry date on office hours.

There continues to be a lot of interest about analogue design with the open source PDK. To cover this interest, I’ve previously interviewed: Diego about his opamp, Lakshmi about her PLL and Thomas about his satellite transceiver. One of the big changes in MPW2 was the provision of more analogue support in the form of Caravan - a new harness. This is exciting because one of the key advantages of an ASIC over an FPGA is the mixed signal capability.

We did it! 14 people from the course got their designs into the group submission, and the project was accepted for fabrication. Silicon here we come! You can get all the details on all the projects submitted to MPW2 here - you’ll need to select the MPW2 filter. And see how I put the application together here, with the repo here. Project listing RGB Mixer Author: Matt Venn Github: https://github.com/mattvenn/wrapped_rgb_mixer/tree/caravel-mpw-two-c Description: reads 3 encoders and generates PWM signals to drive an RGB LED Frequency counter Author: Matt Venn Github: https://github.

Caravel is the name of the harness provided by Efabless to make it easier to submit a design to the foundry. Among other things, it provides: The padring 3kB of memory A small RISCV processor called PicoRV32 GPIOs A logic analyser A Wishbone bus For the full details, check the documentation The simplest way to interface between your project and the PicoRV32 is probably the logic analyser. This gives you 128 ins and outs that you can use to configure or debug your design.

Efabless have announced MPW2! The closing date is the 18th of June. The biggest changes are: OpenLANE ASIC flow updated to rc0.15 Caravel has become caravel_user_project at the mpw-two-c tag: smaller repo size includes a ‘Caravel Lite’ submodule new IRQ ports logic analyser registers renamed An alternative analogue specific ‘Caravan’ harness The submission process has been streamlined to make it faster and easier to submit You can browse the current applications here: https://platform.

In this interview Dan and I talk about his submission to the first shuttle, simulating video projects, how to do graphics with no frame buffer and the joys of retro gaming. Caravel repo: https://github.com/dan-rodrigues/caravel_vdp_lite IceStation32: https://github.com/dan-rodrigues/icestation-32