Everything Old is New Again

Woohoo! A new project, or at the very least some new stuff to learn about. It’s been a while since I learnt about the basics of VLSI design and, in particular the ‘Magic’ chip design software package.

Google have just announced that they are partnering with SkyWater Technology Foundry to produce the “SkyWater Open Source PDK“, to produce a fully open Process Design Kit, for producing VLSI Chips. The 130nm process isn’t the newest, but it is still suitable for a variety of hardware applications.

As part of this collaboration, Google has also announced that they will be sponsoring a chip fabrication run later in the year, completely free for the chosen projects, when all the project code, file and documentation is Free and Open Source.

I’m not sure about you, but I have always loved the thought of producing a custom designed chip, otherwise known as an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit). There is going to be a whole bunch of things that I am going to have to learn, but being involved in the process of producing something like that will be awesome.

The aim is produce the design with cells provided in the SkyWater PDK. The initial proposal is that there will approximately 10mm^2 apace available (Maybe 3mm x 3mm). The 130nm process would there allow an area of 10,000 x 10,000 transistors ( Very roughly, if the transistors were 300nm in size. 3×10^-3 / (0.3 x 10^-6) = 10 x 10^3 )

Any-ho, this should be a lot of fun… and the Skywater-PDK Slack community has been particularly helpful.

References

Useful process documentation

Introduction to the design process for the chip fabrication process – https://www.vlsisystemdesign.com/inception-content-vsd/