I’ve always thought the artwork people put in the top layer of their chips was cool. Do a google image search for chip artwork to see some more fun examples.

While waiting for some toolchain bugs to get ironed out I’ve made a tool to help me make logos. It can take SVG or PNG input and makes a GDS2 file output. These files can then be merged together to create the final layout for the ASIC.

The Google / Skywater shuttle reserves about 10 square mm (10 million square microns) of space for your design.

This comparison that Mohamed from efabless put together shows the various areas (and time to generate the GDS2 files) of some popular designs.

We could fit in about 10 picorv32 RISCV cores!

My designs

I currently have 3 designs ready to add to the multi project harness:

Name	Square microns	How many would fit?
seven segment seconds	10000	1000
vga clock	32400	300
ws2812 LED driver	72900	140

There is a lot of room for simple designs!

This is one of the first projects I hardened using OpenLane.

News update: my clock works! And you can buy a kit here!

Still can't quite believe I have a clock on my desk that is powered by a chip I designed! pic.twitter.com/O5c2omQYYp

— Matthew Venn (@matthewvenn) March 31, 2022

It shows the time on an LCD panel. It will be part of my first tapeout.

After running the OpenLane ASIC flow, it results in a design that uses 180x180 microns (32000 square microns). As we have about 10e6 square microns in the user project area of the Google shuttle, I could potentially put about 300 of these on the ASIC!

The Google/Skywater Shuttle has about 10 square mm of space for your project. This sounds tiny but is actually HUGE for many beginner projects. Read this post to find out what you could fit in the user space.

For the Zero to ASIC course, I want to aggregate all your designs together into that area, so we need to do some extra bits:

• Multiplex all the inputs and outputs of your project to the GPIO pins of the Caravel harness.
• Connect important signals like clocks and make sure the tools know they are special
• there will need to be a bit of firmware on the SoC that sets up the GPIOs for each design and sets it active.

I recently presented a demo/presentation for Hackaday’s #remoticon.

• slides from the talk
• presentation tools

A standard cell is a building block that contains some basic digital or analogue functionality. These blocks are then tiled together to make the final design.

Since finding out about the Skywater PDK, I wanted to try drawing my own ‘standard cell’ using the Skywater transistor models.

An inverter is one of the simplest and even that was quite difficult! As you can see below it contains an N and P type MOSFET.