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W04 3rd Workshop Open-Source Design Automation (OSDA 2023)

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Room
Okapi Room 0.8.3
Organiser
Christian Krieg, Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Austria
Organiser
Claire Xenia Wolf, YosysHQ, Austria
Organiser
Andrea Borga, oliscience, Netherlands

OSDA intends to provide an avenue for industry, academics, and hobbyists to collaborate, network, and share their latest visions and open-source contributions, with a view to promoting reproducibility and re-usability in the design automation space.  DATE provides the ideal venue to reach this audience since it is the flagship European conference in this field - particularly poignant due to the recent efforts across the European Union (and beyond) that mandate “open access” for publicly funded research to both published manuscripts as well as software code necessary for reproducing its conclusions.

We invited authors of major tools and flows to talk about their recent activities to promote open-source hardware, and open-source design automation. Below you will find the list of speakers who kindly accepted our invitation already. The list is not yet complete, so hang on and watch out for updates!

The list is given in alphabetical order.

A secondary objective of this workshop is to provide a peer-reviewed forum for researchers to publish “enabling” technology such as infrastructure or tooling as open-source contributions -- standalone technology that would not normally be regarded as novel by traditional conferences -- such that others inside and outside of academia may build upon it.

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W04.1 Welcome Session

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Workshop opening and poster pitch

W04.2 Front-end and Applications

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Presentations

W04.2.1 Larry Doolittle

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vhd2vl is a simple and open-source stand-alone program that converts synthesizable VHDL to Verilog. While it has plenty of limitations, it has proved useful to many developers since its start in 2004. This talk will cover its strengths, weaknesses, and alternatives.

W04.2.2 Antonino Tumeo

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This talk presents the SODA (Software Defined Accelerators) framework, an open-source modular, multi-level, no-human-in-the-loop, hardware compiler that enables end-to-end generation of specialized accelerators from high-level data science frameworks. SODA is composed of SODA-Opt, a high-level frontend developed in MLIR that interfaces with domain-specific programming environments and allows performing system level design, and Bambu, a state-of-the-art high-level synthesis (HLS) engine that can target different device technologies. The framework implements design space exploration as compiler optimization passes. We show how the modular, yet tight, integration of the high-level optimizer and lower-level HLS tools enables the generation of accelerators optimized for the computational patterns of novel "converged" applications. We then discuss some of the research opportunities that such an open-source framework allows.

W04.2.3 Matthew Guthaus

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In this talk, Prof. Guthaus presents the current status of the OpenRAM project including Skywater 130 tape-out results. In addition, Prof. Guthaus will discuss the future roadmap of the OpenRAM project features and support for newer technologies.

W04.2.4 Tsung-Wei Huang

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Today's EDA algorithms demand large parallel and heterogeneous computing resources for performance. However, writing parallel EDA algorithms is extremely challenging due to highly complex and irregular patterns. This talk will present a novel programming system to help tackle the parallelization challenges of building high-performance EDA algorithms.

W04.2.5 Tim Edwards

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This talk explores how hardware projects designed using an open source PDK rely too much on precise data which may not be available, and how problems can be avoided by certain design methodologies such as two-phase clocking, negative-edge clocking, margining, and monte carlo simulation. While open PDK data can be made more reliable by cross validation with multiple tools and, ultimately, measurement, good design practices can achieve working silicon without absolute certainty.

W04.2.6 Rishiyur Nikhil

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BSV and BH, the Bluespec HLHDLs (High-Level Languages for Hardware Design), emerged from ideas in formal specification (Term Rewriting Systems), functional programming (Haskell), and automatic synthesis of RTL from specifications. BSV has been used in some major commercial ASIC designs and is used widely in FPGA projects. The BSV/BH compiler (written in Haskell) was open-sourced in 2020 (https://github.com/B-Lang-org/bsc) and today's projects are centered around RISC-V design and verification, and on accelerators.

W04.2.7 Frans Skarman

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Frans will present Spade, a new open source standalone hardware description language. He will show how Spade's abstractions and tooling, which is inspired by software languages, improves the productivity of an HDL without sacrificing low level control.

W04.3 Poster Session (coffee break)

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  • Davide Cieri, Nicolò Vladi Biesuz, Rimsky Alejandro Rojas Caballero, Francesco Gonnella, Nico Giangiacomi, Guillermo Loustau De Linares and Andrew Peck: Hog 2023.1: a collaborative management tool to handle Git-based HDL repository
  • Lucas Klemmer and Daniel Grosse: Programming Language Assisted Waveform Analysis: A Case Study on the Instruction Performance of SERV
  • Vamsi Vytla and Larry Doolittle: Newad: A register map automation tool for Verilog
  • Stefan Riesenberger and Christian Krieg: Towards Power Characterization of FPGA Architectures To Enable Open-Source Power Estimation Using Micro-Benchmarks

W04.4 Back-End and Verification

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W04.4.1 Andrew Kahng

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OpenROAD (https://theopenroadproject.org) is an open-source RTL-to-GDS tool that generates manufacturable layout from a given hardware description – in 24 hours, at advanced foundry nodes. OpenROAD lowers the cost, expertise and schedule barriers to hardware design, thus providing a platform for research, education and system innovation. This talk will present current status of the OpenROAD project and the roadmap for OpenROAD as it seeks to enable VLSI/EDA education, early design space exploration for system designers, research on machine learning in EDA, and more.

W04.4.2 Jean-Paul Chaput

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The talk will be focused on two majors points : why Open Hardware is as important as Open Source Software and the major challenges in building FOSS EDA tools.

W04.4.3 Myrtle Shah

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Myrtle will introduce some of the recent developments in nextpnr; including easier ways of prototyping new architectures as well as some core algorithm improvements. They will also introduce FABulous, a highly flexible open source eFPGA fabric generator, and its close integration with nextpnr.

W04.4.4 Tristan Gingold

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GHDL is an open-source VHDL simulator and synthesis tool. This talk will present the latest added features and some ideas for future development (in particular mixed simulation)

W04.4.5 Jim Lewis

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Open Source VHDL Verification Methodology (OSVVM) provides VHDL with buzz word verification capabilities including Transaction Level Modeling, Constrained Random, Functional Coverage, Scoreboards, FIFOs, Memory Models, Error and Message handling, and Test Reporting that are simple to use and feel like built-in language features. OSVVM has grown rapidly during the COVID years, giving us better capability, better test reporting (HTML and Junit), and scripting that is simple to use (and works with most VHDL simulators). This presentation shows how these advances fit into the overall OSVVM Methodology.

W04.4.6 Claire Xenia Wolf

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In her talk, Claire will discuss recent developments in open-source verification tools. Claire will briefly present equivalence checking with Yosys (EQY) and mutation cover with Yosys (MCY), and will highlight potential future directions.