Successful VSD hackathon mantra – Trust, plan and execute !!

To provide a basic hands-on for design verification, which enhances practical verification knowledge. The verification challenge helps to understand the verification intent to detect bugs in designs, understand debugging and fix the buggy designs. It provides a practical exposure to real world design verification activities

The hackathon aims to generate skilled manpower in the domain of Design Verification, which will strengthen the quality of designs being manufactured. It reduces chip failure, improving the time to market cycle of Semiconductor products.

The Indian government initiative Chips to Startup (C2S) programme aims to propel innovation, build domestic capacities to ensure hardware sovereignty, and build a semiconductor ecosystem that requires 85,000+ highly trained engineers. Working towards this vision statement, we have planned the 3-Week “Capture the Bug” , a Design Verification Challenge.
This Hackathon is organized by NIELIT Calicut and technically facilitated by Vyoma Systems , VLSI System Design & IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and ably mentored by Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras).

Continue reading

VSD-HDP : Verilator Verification Environment for RISC-V vector accelerator

In a nutshell, the project really is to build a Verilator Verification environment i.e. a structure in which we can set up testbenches that are executed with Verilator. The thing which is interesting in this project is we are going to tie that Verilator piece with a golden model arithmetic library and that is going to be something that you can publish as nobody else in the world has that

It’s a Verilator Testbench environment that uses an online arithmetic library to generate the right bit pattern. We are not using randoms, but we are using a Golden model. If you progress from ALU to a vector accelerator, you will have a vector lane, vector register file, vector load/store unit, vector instructions.

Continue reading

What I did in 8-weeks-VSD Internship? – Vezzal

Constant development of tools often breaks something internally which can lead to other issues. Hence there is a need to test the tool for its previous supporting features. But the tool needs an environment to get launched and good test cases to test the features. This is called as “Continuous Integration (CI)”. I

Continue reading

What I did in 8-weeks-VSD Internship? – Open Source Power Analysis Tool Using Python

Power analysis has materialized as a principal theme in today’s world in semiconductor industries. As very large scale integrated circuit (VLSI) are far beyond from human ability because of complexity in nature. So to analyse power in these circuits we use open source computer aided tools, plenty of tools are available but most of them are costly. I designed an open source power analysis tool for the academic use. This tool gives out values of average and leakage power of any circuit by just giving the netlist of circuit file along with name of supply voltage as input. This tool is designed in python language.

Continue reading

Ever heard of Chip Design Pentagon?

Know what Pentagon is? It is a plane figure which has 5-straight sides and 5-angles. For a perfect pentagon, it needs all its sides and angles to be the same, till the last decimal. Do you know what is the similarity between pentagon and our upcoming workshop “Advanced Physical Design workshop using OpenLANE/SKY130”?  Look above image and you would guess it right. It is a perfect blend of topics where even a fresher can jump-start his/her career in chip design in just 5-days

Continue reading