Breakfast Bytes Update: DATE, OpenROAD, Starlink

This is one of my occasional posts where I update some posts that I covered earlier, but which don't justify an entire post of their own. However, I ended up with so much material that I split this post into two since it got so long. In yesterday's post Breakfast Bytes Update: Learning & Support, Undersea Datacenter, I covered updates to Cadence's Support and Learning Center (online training is now free!), and Microsoft's Project Natick to put an experimental datacenter in a submerged tank for two years.

DATE

DATE (Design And Test Europe) 2021 is going fully virtual. I am the publicity chair, as I wrote in Make a DATE for the Alps Next Ski Season although I've not really done anything much yet since we don't know the details of the program or, until this week, if it would be virtual or hybrid. The dates for DATE remain the same, February 1st to 5th 2021. If you are not based in Europe, it is a lot easier to attend than it was, so put it on your calendar!

OpenROAD

In a recent post, I wrote about the  CHIPS Alliance Workshop .This is about open source hardware and open source EDA. I gave an overview of the day and covered Quicklogic's completely open source FPGA flow in more detail. Another presentation was by Andrew Kahng of UC San Diego on OpenROAD. I've covered this a couple of times before, most recently in November last year in OpenROAD: Open-Source EDA from RTL to GDSII. Although the project started using a mature process, the goal is to be able to do synthesis, place and route of an entire design in a leading-edge process completely automatically ("no human in the loop"). At the CHIPS Alliance Workshop, Andrew gave an update.

The original proof of concept was in 65nm last summer. Now they are down to 12nm FinFET (GLOBALFOUNDRIES). The design is quite large without being a multi-billion transistor behemoth. Netlist is 530K instances, so probably a couple of million gates, with 49 SRAMS.

Single-core BlackParrot, final netlist ~530K instances, 49 SRAM. It is DRC clean RTL to GDS II as of July 15th. It is a modern flow with modern libraries: GF12LP, Invecas IOs, Arm 9T cells and memories.. However, as you can see from the layout above, it is not yet an aggressive floorplan but even so I consider it quite an achievement. Here's the flow at another level of detail.

It is also architected very much like a modern physical design tool with shared databases and callbacks. In Andrew's words:

When I say that OpenROAD has the architecture of a modern EDA place-and-route tool, this is what I mean. This incremental Shared Netlist Architecture is the guts of commercial P&R tools since the early 2000s.

The Shared Netlist or Abstract Network Adapter enables incremental netlist modification, and communicates with Synthesis, Placement, CTS, Post-Place Opt, Routing, and the Timer. This picture (below) shows how if Synthesis changes the netlist, then there is a callback that place-and-route is listening for – Then, if P&R changes the location or the routing, this is updated via the Shared Physical or Data Model Adapter which handles physical information such as placement location or routed metal shapes. The timer is listening for a netlist change, and to update delays and slews, the delay calculation uses the updated location and routing information. This architecture enables thousands of sizing or incremental moves per second – which is the heart of optimization in modern physical synthesis and P&R.

SpaceX and Starlink

I wrote about Starlink in my post What If It's Not 5G, But Satellites? in February.

They are now apparently running tests using the system to communicate with emergency workers during the Washington state fires. Here's a ZDnet piece SpaceX's Starlink in action: Internet satellites keep emergency workers online amid wildfires. Here's the key quote:

It's emerged that SpaceX's Starlink satellites have been delivering internet services since early August to the Washington state military's emergency management unit helping residents recover from recent wildfires. As noted by CNBC, providing services to Washington emergency responders is the first publicly known application of the satellite broadband service.

There are more details on the performance in the article linked to above.

SpaceX is planning to launch the next batch of satellites on October 2nd (aka today). That will bring its total number of satellites to 800, which it seems is enough to provide "moderate" service to the whole of North America. The launch will be streamed on the SpaceX YouTube channel.

You can watch the last launch (September 3rd):

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