IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Spring 2023 - 92

straightforward while being
mature. I would invite every
IC enthusiast to try them out
and experience the progress in
open source firsthand. "
Ali Hammoud said:
" Open source chip design
reflects the new shift towards
hybrid engineers that are in
tune with both software and
hardware. So I can spend a
week designing, or if
I'm in
tune with software, I can just
spend a day coding my chip. "
Nealson Li commented:
" It is an honor to take part
in the first-ever IEEE SSCS
" Code-a-Chip " competition and
to be selected as one of the winners.
It is me and my teammate,
Muya Chang's pleasure to contribute
to the open source IC
design ecosystem with our design
of a configurable CORDIC
(Coordinate Rotation Digital
Computer). The design is implemented
through the OpenLane
RTL to GDS flow targeting the
open source SKY130 PDK and
captured in a Jupyter Notebook
that is available for the public.
It has been a great experience
to present our work at ISSCC
2023 and promote open source
IC design to the community. "
Yihai Zhang wrote:
" During my time as a master's
student in computer engineering,
I worked on a project
that involved designing a superscalar
processor using open
source tools. I decided to go
through a fully open source
flow to implement the RTL-toGDSII
flow. I think it is meaningful
for both self-development
and community. We divided
the workload among team
members and assigned specific
components to each person.
Designing these units was a
challenging task as we had to
ensure that the processor could
execute multiple instructions
in parallel without encountering
any errors. We worked long
hours, often staying up late into
the night to ensure that our design
was optimized for performance
and reliability. Finally,
though it was really difficult, it
was also rewarding to see our
hard work pay off. "
The response from the open source
and SSCS community regarding these
past activities has been very positive.
As a result, the SSCS continues
with the " Code-a-Chip " travel grant
award program, targeting the 2023
Symposium on VLSI Technology and
Circuits in Kyoto, Japan. The call was
opened on 15 February 2023, and up
to 10 winners will be announced on
14 April 2023 at the SSCS Open-Source
Ecosystem (OSE) Code-a-Chip GitHub
portal (https://github.com/sscs-ose/
sscs-ose-code-a-chip.github.io).
In addition, 2023 started with a lot
of vigor and enthusiasm by announcing,
for the third year in a row, the
SSCS open source IC design contest.
In contrast to previous Chipathon
editions (which were topically open
ended), this year's goal is to create
a specific set of building blocks that
can be reused to benefit the community
as a whole. The design target,
sketched in Figure 3, is a " lab bench
on a chip " system that can be used
to characterize basic analog circuit
blocks through an oscilloscope and
waveform generator functionality.
Participants are requested to submit
innovative ideas on how these blocks
should be implemented. A jury will
select the best proposals (submitted
as Jupyter Notebooks) to assemble a
collection of teams that will work together
toward tapeout. We anticipate
tapeouts of several candidate designs
toward the end of the year, targeting
GlobalFoundries' GF180MCU
(a)
(b)
FIGURE 2: " Code-a-Chip " travel grant award recipients (a) recognized at the ISSCC Student Research Preview Evening Event and
(b) presenting their work during the poster session.
92
SPRING 2023
IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

https://github.com/sscs-ose/sscs-ose-code-a-chip.github.io https://github.com/sscs-ose/sscs-ose-code-a-chip.github.io

IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Spring 2023

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