#650 – Accessible ASICs with Andreas Olofsson

Welcome back, Andreas Olofsson of ZeroASIC!

• Andreas was on the show back in 2015 (ep 254) talking about the Parallela, a crowdfunded parallel calcuation board by his then-company Adapteva


• What is enabling more open source to happen?
  
  
  
  • Unit economics really impact silicon designs
  
  
  • Open source effects have been having a positive effect on the industry. Andreas maintains a meta repo of 400 tools.
  
  
  
  


• Fewer fabs than 2008, mask sets still expensive


• Semiconductor singularity


• Andreas is deep into the world of “chiplets”


• This is the basis of his new company ZeroASIC


• Before he started that he was a program manager at a little outfit called DARPA


• Andreas focused on lowering costs, with the idea that 3 people should be able to design a chip


• He worked under Bill Chappell, the director of the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO)


• OpenROAD


• POSH


• CHIPS


• TinyTapeout


• Andrew Kang UCSD


• Chiplets


• We had Ming Zhang on to tlk about ZGlue, but that was a slightly different architecture


• What is a chiplet?


• AXI on chip


• SERDES


• Types of interconnect


• Organic


• Types of output


• SIP, Chip, SOM


• ZeroASIC is Andreas’ latest company


• They started by releasing a Silicon compiler project


• New thing is take system customers and build them an ASIC


• Optimizing speed and cost


• Mostly targeting aerospace and defense


• Try it out yourself on the ZeroASIC emulation page


• Their main processor is a Quadcore RISC V


• There are no off the shelf chiplets


• eFabric Active Interposer


• Defining a standard


• arm made a standard called amba


• AIB from Intel was opensourced


• Getting external contributors (hardware vs software)


• LatchUp – Fossi


• Personal passion drives people to contribute


• You’re really buying a datasheet from a big company


• Loading the design to AWS


• Check out the ZeroASIC openings


• Read about how ZeroASIC is democratizing chip making