The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

#650 – Accessible ASICs with Andreas Olofsson

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Welcome back, Andreas Olofsson of ZeroASIC!

  • Andreas was on the show back in 2015 (ep 254) talking about the Parallela, a crowdfunded parallel calcuation board by his then-company Adapteva
  • What is enabling more open source to happen?
    • Unit economics really impact silicon designs
    • Open source effects have been having a positive effect on the industry. Andreas maintains a meta repo of 400 tools.
    • Fewer fabs than 2008, mask sets still expensive
    • Semiconductor singularity
    • Andreas is deep into the world of “chiplets”
    • This is the basis of his new company ZeroASIC
    • Before he started that he was a program manager at a little outfit called DARPA
    • Andreas focused on lowering costs, with the idea that 3 people should be able to design a chip
    • He worked under Bill Chappell, the director of the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO)
    • OpenROAD
    • POSH
    • CHIPS
    • TinyTapeout
    • Andrew Kang UCSD
    • Chiplets
    • We had Ming Zhang on to tlk about ZGlue, but that was a slightly different architecture
    • What is a chiplet?
    • AXI on chip
    • SERDES
    • Types of interconnect
    • Organic
    • Types of output
    • SIP, Chip, SOM
    • ZeroASIC is Andreas’ latest company
    • They started by releasing a Silicon compiler project
    • New thing is take system customers and build them an ASIC
    • Optimizing speed and cost
    • Mostly targeting aerospace and defense
    • Try it out yourself on the ZeroASIC emulation page
    • Their main processor is a Quadcore RISC V
    • There are no off the shelf chiplets
    • eFabric Active Interposer
    • Defining a standard
    • arm made a standard called amba
    • AIB from Intel was opensourced
    • Getting external contributors (hardware vs software)
    • LatchUp – Fossi
    • Personal passion drives people to contribute
    • You’re really buying a datasheet from a big company
    • Loading the design to AWS
    • Check out the ZeroASIC openings
    • Read about how ZeroASIC is democratizing chip making
      • ...more
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