Hi
In this age where we need new kinds of talent in the VLSI industry, it's time to build a new kind of structured talent generation
machine. Thanks to Google, SKY130 and OpenFPGA for making this happen. For anyone who has attended all VSD-IAT workshops in past years, you might be able to figure out one common node across all workshops - Opensource Skywater 130nm
Now, why is that important? It is important for 2 reasons - "open
source" and "real". Students, freshers and professionals start learning at a different level using real foundry PDKs which is good for multiple reasons, out of which the primary reason is the announcements of so many foundries globally, which in turn demands talent who has sufficient knowledge of at least one foundry node
Every VSD-IAT (Intelligent Assessment Technology) workshop was built as separate projects as all labs had to be ported to the SKY130 technology node. Now a fresher who goes through the VSD-IAT workshop is by default aware of PDK terms and is also aware of real challenges one might face while using real foundry data. The various topics covered in workshops are an industry ASIC flow as shown in the image. It's globally tested and proven by 12,000+
students
So how are FPGA and SKY130 related? FPGA is a parallel arm to ASIC, which is much faster for prototyping. And many videos are already available on websites on how to program FPGAs. The part which we wanted to do differently in this workshop was to show how to build an FPGA fabric using SKY130 and compare your FPGA fabric with proprietary FPGA tools. This exercise helps FPGA companies to get fresh FPGA talents with unique skills which are currently scarce.
Many new workshops and topics related to
SKY130 will be added in upcoming years which goes below and above the flow shown in the image. So stay tuned to VSD in 2023
