The Power Delivery Network is what provides power for all the macros in your design.

For the shuttle, OpenLANE creates a PDN that supplies the 4 rails available to the user project area:

inout vdda1,    // User area 1 3.3V supply
inout vdda2,    // User area 2 3.3V supply
inout vssa1,    // User area 1 analog ground
inout vssa2,    // User area 2 analog ground
inout vccd1,    // User area 1 1.8V supply
inout vccd2,    // User area 2 1.8v supply
inout vssd1,    // User area 1 digital ground
inout vssd2,    // User area 2 digital ground

Metal 4 is used for vertical lines that are cut for the macros, and Metal 5 routes over the top of everything. When the metal 5 lines pass over the macro, vias are dropped to connect the macro’s internal PDN to the user project area’s PDN.

A common failure for small designs with the OpenLane tools is that there isn’t enough area for the PDN to get created. A simple fix is setting the absolute size of the die to make sure its large enough.

Course feedback

For a very long time I’ve been fascinated by ASICs and have been close to them in my professional life as well, but not really as much into the detail as I would want. It’s been a fascination since grad school at least, so I've been interested in seeing more open source alternatives crop up, and now with the skywater PDK and OpenLane it seemed like the right time. It’s still a bit hard to get the motivation to get started, it feels like a bit of a hurdle so when I saw this course I just jumped right on it. It felt like a perfect way to get started.

Klas Nordmark (digital course)