Monday MPW-2 Update - Nov 7, 2022

[Jeff]

Hello everyone,

Apologies for missing the communication last week.  Please see updates for this week.  

Caravel Redesign

• After reviewing the parasitic estimates for the sky130B process with Reram, we’ve decided more work is required to ensure we have proper timing signoff for the B version of Caravel.

• That said, we are planning to move forward with the current Caravel Design based on sky130A for MPW-6 and MPW-7.  We will split the wafer lot to process a subset of the wafers separately for Reram layers.

• As we are preparing and reviewing the STA scripts we plan to provide to the community to perform top level timing for their designs, we identified another issue with the STA timing flow where timing parasitic data for one of the DFFRAM blocks was not being loaded successfully by the script.

• We are implementing changes in the flow to catch this type of failure and prevent it from recurring in our flow going forward.

• The corrected flow presented timing violations with the DFFRAM block that requires an update to the Caravel Design.  

• We are expecting that to be updated within the next 24 hrs and verification simulations will be rerun as we continue to update projects for the shuttles.

MPW-2 Hardware

• We are still completing final firmware for the Nucleo test setup. A couple of functions required additional effort to port to the Micropython platform running on the Nucleo board.

•  Shipments will begin as soon as testing completes.

• 
  

MPW-7

• The STA timing scripts are completing final review and we expect to release them this week for project owners to rerun their designs.

Regards,

Jeff DiCorpo