Two Weeks Until Tapeout

Summary

Living under rocks#As anyone that hasn’t been living under a rock might have heard, AI accelerators are the coolest kids in town these days. And although I have never been part of the “in” crowd, this time at least, I get the appeal.So when the opportunity arose to join an experimental shuttle using global foundries 180nm for FREE I jumped onto the opportunity and designed my own JTAG!…I’m sorry? Is this not what you were expecting?Frankly, I would love to tell you a great story about how I went into this wanting to design a free and open source silicon proven AI accelerator that the community could freely extend and re-use in their own projects. But in truth this project started out first as me wanting to design some far less sexy, in-silicon debug infrastructure and only later came to include the systolic matrix matrix multiplication accelerator … to serve as the design under test.No wonder I was never one of the cool kids.Also, I’m designing everything from scratch and have only two weeks left, welcome to the crunch.GDS rendering of this project using the GF180 PDK If you are looking for a more formal overview of this ASIC, you can find the datasheet hereExperimental shuttle#Once again this tapeout was done as part of a Tiny Tapeout shuttle, but this time, it went out as not part of a public but an experimental shuttle. You can learn more about the awesome Tiny Tapeout shuttle programs at the official website: https://tinytapeout.comThese experimental shuttles are used as testing grounds for new nodes and flows in order to iron out issues before they are opened to the public.Participation in these experimental shuttles is commonly reserved to contributors having previously submitted to Tiny Tapeout.This limitation was set in place in order to help select for veteran designers as these experimental tapeout typically have less stable tooling and the final chip doesn’t feature the same level of inter design isolation as in a public tapeout.Contributions to these shu...