FASoC: Fully-Autonomous SoC Synthesis using Customizable Cell-Based Synthesizable Analog Circuits

The FASoC Program is focused on developing a complete system-on-chip (SoC) synthesis tool from user specification to GDSII. See more on our website.

FASoC tool can be operated in three modes, "Verilog", "Macro" and "Full" modes.

Verilog Generation Mode

The provided generators can generate fully synthesizable verilog products using the user input specification file. The generated verilog will be derived from pre-characterized modules. Future releases of the tool will also generate a human readable constraint guidance that will aid in maximizing post layout design performance.

Macro/Full Generation Mode

The macro generation mode will generate hard macros in addition to the verilog. These hard macros are synthesized and implemented versions of the verilog output using recommended constraints and physical guidance. This mode will require the commercial tools, access to the standard/cells, PDK and other tools. It will also require an automated flow (cadre flow) as well as several private files that are restricted due to NDA requirements.

Setup instructions

1. Tool requirements:

   • General: Python 3.6/3.7 (packages getopt, math, numpy, os, re, shutil, subprocess, sys, smtplib, datetime, logging, matplotlib). Python versions below 3.6 are not supported.
   • Cadre Flow:
     • Synopsys Library Compiler (2018.06)
     • Synopsys Design Compiler (2018.06) (Cadence Genus v18.10 can also be used for LDO-GEN & PLL-GEN)
     • Quantus QRC extraction (15.23.000)
     • Cadence Innovus (v18.10)
     • Synopsys Primetime (2018.06)
     • Mentor Graphics Calibre (2019.3_25)
   • Synopsys HSPICE (2017.03-SP1)
   • Cadence Liberate (16.1.1.132)
   • Cadence Spectre (15.1.0)

   Newer versions of the tools are expected, but not guaranteed to work.

2. Run the environment checker script to ensure all the tools are setup

   make check_env

3. Ensure you have access to the required private repository for FASoC. Please contact [email protected] if you need access

4. Ensure you have ssh keys setup for github. Instructions for generating and adding ssh keys can be found here.

5. Clone the FASoC repository

   git clone [email protected]:idea-fasoc/fasoc.git

6. Initialize the submodules

   cd fasoc
   git submodule update --init --recursive

7. Setup the cadre flow to for your specific location. The "Macro/Full" modes currently requires TSMC65LP PDK and ARM standard cells. More instructions on how to setup this particular platform can be found in the Cadre Flow Guide

8. Change directory to the generator of interest and follow instructions in the readme

Citation

If you find this tool useful in your research, we kindly request to cite our paper:

• T. Ajayi et al., “An open-source framework for autonomous soc design with analog block generation,” in 2020 IFIP/IEEE 28th International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI-SOC). IEEE, 2020.

• @inproceedings{ajayi2020open,
  title={An open-source framework for autonomous SoC design with analog block generation},
  author={Ajayi, Tutu and Kamineni, Sumanth and Cherivirala, Yaswanth K and Fayazi, Morteza and Kwon, Kyumin and Saligane, Mehdi and Gupta, Shourya and Chen, Chien-Hen and Sylvester, Dennis and Blaauw, David and others},
  booktitle={2020 IFIP/IEEE 28th International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI-SOC)},
  pages={141--146},
  year={2020},
  organization={IEEE}}