Craig designed and built the Gameslab, which is a custom gaming platform built with a Xilinx Zynq part (XC7Z035). (Update: Craig has been posting more about the Gameslab on his site here)Bought reballed chips on PCBs. They were actually a $1200 chip he got for $80.Episode with Ryan CousinsThere is apparently a kit for counterfeiting Xilinx chipsNational lab has a pdf on how to detect counterfeitsDigilent ZyboCraig built the board on the JLC 6 layer process at 210x100 for each board. $150 for 5 PCBs.DDR3 chip was .8mm pitchUsing stack up to calculate impedance/prop delayUsed an excel sheet to track delay and skew for nets, since KiCad can't track delays between layersFPGA on chip delays are also stated in the datasheet and need to be accounted for.Running Rust on STM32L0, on kernel modules in A9, applications / gamesSense resistors with instrumentation amps going to the ADC to measure each rail's current draw.BQ24250 chip for charging with configurable registersZynq doesn't necessarily need the bitstream programmed first. Instead the A9s boot first and can load the bitstream.Every game brings its own hardwareCan put the Gameboy hardware into the fabric!Craig doesn't like verilog, so he uses a higher level language called SpinalHDL. It is a fork of Chisel, which is based on Scala.Each of the above languages are strongly typed. Loosely typed means you can convert between data types, like in C."Verilog is becoming the assembly language of FPGAs"ZipCPUAXI busMost designs need to reimplement different hardware blocks. But there are libraries in Chisel, which can implement things easier.Vex Risc VCreated a frame buffer for the LCD and some 2d graphics acceleration on the Gameslab.Learned to program to make PC games. This was part of the idea behind the Gamesphere project as well.PIC18F452 in a 40 pin DIPUsed AT91R4000 for the game sphereAndrei LaMothe wrote the book "The Black Art of video game console design"Cypress dual port SRAMCraig's first "big boy job" was working for a a neighbor up the street starting a semiconductor packaging company (Tim Olson)Deca Technologies was opening a Wafer Level Chip Scale packaging fab in the Philippines.After iphone came out, there was a lot of demand for low profile complex chips.Raspberry Pi photon problemAdded a "squishy" layer to the silicon, and then exposing certain parts of the silicon to the interconnect.The graphics problem was that they wanted to make the chip bigger but the silicon smallerEWLB from Infineon looks like a plastic wafer.Can put two chips next to each otherThere was a paper about the subject (has the image Chris and Craig were discussing during recording).Sometimes the parts are placed 30 microns to the left, which is not good for the substrate they are placed upon.Can get really expensive PnP machines but they go slow.The microscope would spit out X, Y and rotation, but it scales with chip complexity, such as when there are two chips.Needed to do traces between themCraig's job was to take the output and do some autorouting between them.Feature sizes were 1 micronPackage design looks like PCB designCadence sells System in Package designer but is really Allegro with different plugins.Can people do their own SIP?Craig thinks that design will move towards more SIPSplit die architectureSplit it into a few pieces: This will help improve yield and flexibility, as well as modularity.Chris asked about Chiplets, a topic that is championed by Dr Subu (sp?)Chiplets are going to do interconnect in silicon, not plasticExample is BLE and microAdaptive alignmentCraig gave a talk at KiCon about how Autorouters work and how they have been improving.Not your grandpa's autorouterFreerouting is nice and available but it's not the latestTopoRMoving towards interactive design (P&R), but Craig thinks it should go the other way.Generative design would be betterDave Vandenbout's SKiDL talkCraig was briefly interviewed by Piotr and Alvaro at KiConFind Craig on his personal site where he is documenting his projects (craigjb.com) and also find him as @craig_jbishop on Twitter.Check out the Phoenix 3H (hardware happy hour) if you're in the area!
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