Hi
Let me start by introducing all of you to the above three
gentlemen and their story
- Tim Ansell - Software Engineer, Google
- Prof. Kannan M Moudgalya - Professor of Chemical Engineering department, IIT Bombay
- Myself, Kunal
Ghosh - Startup Co-founder at VLSI System Design (VSD)
This is a perfectly unsuitable combination to start a revolution in the open-source semiconductor and chip design community, which is the toughest to crack.
But someone had to...That's when all three of us teamed up and studied the problems currently faced by the student community to enter the semiconductor industry. The first hurdle for students was to understand circuit design and simulation, and the student community, which is at the beginner level of designing, needs a forum to learn, understand and simulate. This marathon provided a platform for the global student
community.
Now that we had identified the problem, it was time to build a scalable solution as the three gentlemen in the above pic had a clear vision for open-source chip design - it has to reach young minds. With all efforts made by FOSSEE and VSD Team, eSim was integrated with 130nm foundry PDKs by Skywater Technology,
the entire solution, along with high-quality SKY130-based fundamental spoken tutorials, was made available on the LMS platform and the first hackathon was launched last year somewhere around June with 2900+ participants globally
Digital and Analog individually are easy to design. But, the whole world uses mixed-signal chips. Unless we had a mixed-signal framework
built within eSim and unless it is used by young minds to innovate, the job was not finished yet. The three gentlemen teamed up again along with a few more dedicated members (Steve Hoover, Proppy, Sumanto, Nagesh, Phillip Guhring, Rahul, and Firuza). The whole team worked day and night to integrate 70+ Analog/digital SKY 130-based IPs in eSim Repo and finally the entire solution along with some more high-quality spoken tutorials was made available on the LMS platform.
Taking ahead of this initiative, two more global hackathons on mixed-signal SoC design using SKY130 were launched leading to 4500+ participants globally. We had close to 375+ winners across all three hackathons which are close to 5% of the total number of participants registering for the hackathon. In
other words, we have 375+ mixed-signal IPs floating in market ready to see silicon.
So guess what - we are just getting started. Stay tuned for next marathon
