Hello,
Registration is now open for the meeting October meeting. Details below.
Regards,
Andrew
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Event #36 — Chips Pt.2 (Chip Design for Teenagers, Cocotb, lowRISC)
23rd October 2014, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The
Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA.
Registration: http://oshug.org/event/36
Back in April 2011 we had our first meeting on the theme of open
source chip design, and then around one year later we took a closer
look at the OpenRISC Reference Platform System-on-Chip. The
thirty-sixth meeting will feature talks on chip design for teenagers,
an open source verification framework, and a fully open source
system-on-chip that will be manufactured in volume.
— Silicon Chip Design for Teenagers
These days we expect school students to learn to write code, and
teachers are turning to tools like Scratch (for primary education) and
Python (for secondary education). But why stick to software languages.
Why not teach coding in Verilog and get children to design silicon
chips.
Earlier this year Dan Gorringe attended Chip Hack II in Cambridge.
Inspired by this he spent two weeks work experience at Embecosm in
August 2014 modifying the Chip Hack materials for use by Year 9-11
students. His resulting application note, "Silicon Chip Design for
Teenagers", is to be published very shortly by Embecosm.
In this talk, Dan will share his experience of learning silicon chip
design, using Verilog for his first serious attempt at coding and
encountering Mentor Graphics EDA tools for the first time.
Dan Gorringe has just started year 11 and faces the horrors of GCSE
exams in 8 months time, so silicon chip design is just light relief.
He has aspirations to a career in computing.
— Cocotb, an Open Source Verification Framework
Verifying hardware designs has always been a significant challenge but
very few open-source tools have emerged to support this effort. The
recent advances in verification to facilitate complex designs often
depend on specialist knowledge and expensive software tools. In this
talk we will look at Cocotb, an open-source verification framework,
and explore whether Python is a viable language for verification.
Chris Higgs has over a decade of experience working with FPGAs in
various industries. His software background has shaped his approach to
RTL design and verification and he now spends his time trying to
bridge the divide between hardware and software development.
— lowRISC — a Fully Open Source RISC-V System-on-Chip
The lowRISC project has been formed to produce a System-on-Chip which
will be open source right down to the HDL, implementing the open
RISC-V instruction set architecture. Volume manufacture of silicon
manufacture is planned, along with creating and distributing low-cost
development boards. This talk will describe the aims of the lowRISC
project, summarise its current status, describe some of the features
that are being implemented, and give details on how you can get
involved.
Alex Bradbury is a researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer
Laboratory where he works on compilation techniques for a novel
many-core architecture. He writes LLVM Weekly, is co-author of
Learning Python with Raspberry Pi, and has been a contributor to the
Raspberry Pi project since the first alpha hardware was available.
Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the first talk will start at
18:30 prompt.
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