Designing Linux-capable systems-on-chip using open-source EDA tools
For the past few years, open source hardware has gained momentum and open
source hardware IPs, mainly based on RTL descriptions have found widespread use not only in
academia, but in industry as well. With the advent of openly available process design kits
(PDKs), and improved productivity of open source EDA tools, it is now possible to design not only
simple designs, but much complex systems-on-chip (SoCs) using an end-to-end open design flow as
well as publish the physical design and implementation scripts.
In this session, you will learn how to design a digital chip step by step using only open-source
software. You will be guided through the entire process of designing a small microcontroller on your
own PC. We also present our larger Linux-capable SoC, outlining design challenges at this scale and
how we solved them. Finally, we discuss which additional improvements will be needed for
open-source EDA tools to tackle even larger designs.