This course will be free and open to anyone (but tiny-tapeout itself costs
US$25, you can do everything but actually make a chip for free). You will need
to bring a laptop and load software onto it before each class.
The course will be 3 weeks, located at Makerspace 2 hours per night starting
at 7pm, there is a general assumption that you have some programming
experience, we will be wearing masks during the course:
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March 9th: Verilog (a chip design language)
A short talk and then we'll write some verilog
Please install the following two pieces of free software on your laptop:
Icarus Verilog - https://steveicarus.github.io/iverilog/
(binary downloads are available, most Linux systems have them easily available
through apt/yum/etc)
Gtkwave - https://gtkwave.sourceforge.net/
Homework will be to design and test a simple digital circuit in Verilog to
flash some LEDs
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March 16th: FPGAs
we're going to take your design and load it on to an FPGA and try it out, we
will have a couple of boards available to share.
We'll have a short talk talking about place and route and FPGAs, but mostly
we're going to play with stuff.
If possible before the class please install the (free) Xilinix Vivado design
software using the following instructions (warning it's going to take ~60Gb
and take a while, you can throw it away when you are done)
https://digilent.com/reference/programmable-logic/guides/installing-vivado-and-vitis
(I under stand that Mac users may have to do this in a VM)
If you can't fit it on we can share it a little.
Homework will be to refine your design into something we can submit to tiny-
tapeout
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March 23rd: Tiny Tapeout
Tiny tapeout is a shared chip run on one of the multi-project shuttles, you
can find out more here: https://tinytapeout.com/ and there's a talk here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fblSVCPvCiY
It costs US$25 for just a design and US$100 if you want a design, a chip and a
PCB - it's not a for-profit project - I'll be ordering one of these so if you
just order a design you can test it on my PCB when I get it back - or you can
spend the extra and get a board of your own.
(in comparison, when I used to do VLSI design for a living a tapeout cost
~$500K, cad design tools cost about as much)
Chips take a long time to build, we likely wont get a PCB back until the end
of the year.
To prepare for this class you should obtain a github account.
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