Plan for the Friday Zoom lecture: A Chip Designed in the Country of Georgia: ASIC design flow and prototyping on FPGA

[Yuri Panchul]

Zoom link:

https://bit.ly/yuri-panchul-zoom

We are discussing the plan for our zoom call on Friday 18 (English) / Saturday 19 (Russian) / Sunday 20 (Georgian) at 8 am PDT (California time) which is 19.00 Tbilisi time and 20.30 time in India and my suggestions are:

1. Tell the audience what ASIC is. Commercial - expensive, but MPW (shuttle) makes it affordable for universities and TinyTapeout for schools and individuals.

2. Tell the audience what Georgia is: an ancient cultural tradition and the tradition of math education from Soviet times.

3. The design Levan created: a CORDIC algorithm.

4. Demo it on the Tang Nano 9K FPGA board.

5. Explain that we demo it on an FPGA board but move to ASIC after prototyping. Describe the reconfigurable nature of FPGA.

6. Explain that both ASIC and FPGAs are designed using Hardware Description Languages, specifically SystemVerilog. Describe RTL2GDSII flow. You can use the slides from https://bit.ly/verilog-meetup-slides mentioning the source at the bottom of the page.

7. Describe BGM infrastructure. Mention that it is used in more than 30 universities; that it supports 45 FPGA boards and multiple toolchains (Xilinx Vivado, Altera Quartus, Gowin (proprietary and open-source EDA tools) and Lattice (using open-source tools)); “you can just choose a board and run a script”, that it includes not just basic exercises but graphics and music early in classes; that it has microarchitectural exercises with pipelines and FIFOs at a job-interview level.

8. Tell about the Verilog Meetup variant of TinyTapeout template which allows importing BGM lab_top into TinyTapeout infrastructure.

9. Show the structure of your ASIC project.

10. Show on the GitHub website the GDSII viewer, cell usage and static timing analysis report.

11. Let somebody else (for example Timofei who has a TinyTapeout board with the previous design right now) to demonstrate how to connect the manufactured board to the computer and run a design (the basic usage with Web Commander).

12. Describe the importance for the country of Georgia to incorporate these methodologies into the education curriculum to facilitate Georgia’s integration into the world’s infrastructure of electronics.

13. If we have time: Simulation: explain how the Icarus simulation and self-checking testbench is organized.

14. If we have time: moving from simple breadboard exercises to FPGA to ASIC - we can ask some school students on the call (Maya, Svetlana, Matvei, Timofei, Ivan) to show their designs as examples of such transition.

15. Ivan Grafski can tell about other electronic projects in Georgia if he wants.

16. General Q&A.

If anybody has more ideas and suggestions you can share them.