Hardware & Making

LibreSilicon's Standard Cell Library (de)

show + tell
Eliza
chipforge
(en) We make Standard Cells for LibreSilicon available, which are open source and feasible. And we like to talk and demonstrate what we are doing. (de) Wir machen Standardzellen für LibreSilicon verfügbar, welche Open Source und nutzbar sind. Wir möchten darüber sprechen und vorführen, was wir tun.
(en) LibreSilicon develops a free and open source technology to fabricate chips in silicon and provides all information to use them - or technical spoken - a Process Design Kit (PDK). On one abstraction level higher, user always using with their design compile tools a Standard Cell Library (StdCellLib) with basic blocks like logic gates, latches, flipflops, rams, and even pad cells. From a programmers point of view, as a PDK is comparable to a language like C, the Standard Cell Library becomes comparable to libc. All commercial available Standard Cell Libraries containing a small subset of all useful cells only, limited just by the manpower of the vendor. They are hand-crafted and error-prone. Unfortunately Standard Cell Libraries are also commercial exploited with Non-disclosure agreement (NDAs) and heavily depend on the underlying PDKs. Our aim is to become the first free and open source Standard Cell Library available. The lecture shows, how far we are gone, with makefile controlled press-button solution which generates a substantial number of Standard Cells by automated processing and respecting the dependencies in the generated outputs. (de) LibreSilicon entwickelt eine freie und offene Technologie um Siliziumchips herstellen zu können. Dies umfasst alle notwendigen Informationen dies zu tun, oder technisch gesagt, ein Process Design Kit (PDK - engl: Prozessbauskasten). Die Anwender nutzen überwiegend auf einer Abstraktionsebene höher mit ihren Design Compiler meist jedoch die Standardzellenbibliothek (StdCellLib) mit Basisblöcken wie Logikgattern, Latches, FlipFlops, Speicherzellen oder auch Padzellen. Aus Sicht eines Programmierers wäre das PDK vergleichbar einer Sprachdefinition wie C, die darauf aufsetzende Standardzellbibliothek (StdCellLib) dann vergleichbar mit der libc. Nun enthalten alle nur kommerziell verfügbaren Standardzellenbibliotheken lediglich eine kleine Teilmenge aller nützlichen Zellen, limitiert durch die Arbeitskräfte beim Hersteller. Sie sind handgemacht und fehlerträchtig. Unglücklicherweise sind die kommerziellen Standardzellbibliotheken stark vom PDK abhängig und mit Geheimhaltungsvereinbarungen gepflastert. Unser Ziel ist es, die erste freie und offene Standardzellbibliothek zu werden. Dieser Talk zeigt, wie weit wir bereits gekommen sind, mit Hilfe der Makefile-gesteuerten Lösung eine beachtliche Anzahl an Standardzellen und deren Ausgabeformate als Abhängigkeiten automatisiert zu generieren.

Additional information

Type lecture
Language German

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