ChipFlow’s Soft Launch at Imec: A Giant Leap for Open-Source Chip Design
Tomi here, CEO of ChipFlow, reflecting on a momentous few days for our team and the open-source hardware community. We’ve recently concluded a two-day workshop at Imec’s headquarters, bringing together over 50 participants for a journey in open-source chip design. The key focus of the workshop was to highlight the here and now opportunities for ASIC use cases with real life commercial value. Open source hardware has for a long time had a research focus driven by academia, but is now ready to move to the commercial side for even wider business use!
Day 1: Expert Insights
Our first day was packed with knowledge-sharing from some of the best minds in open-source hardware. We heard from many distinguished speakers such as:
Thomas Parry of Spherical, who talked about how open source EDA tools, coupled with commercial tools, enable key Space ASIC use cases.
Phillip Baade Petersen of IHP, who talked about their recent venture into building openPDK and how much more convinced the journey has made them on the benefits of open source HW.
Day 2: Hands-On with ChipFlow’s Design Flow
Day 2 saw over 50 participants invited to get their hands dirty with Chip Flow’s toolset. Over the course of the day attendees were given the opportunity to create a custom ASIC design built on open source IP libraries and tools. During the session we heard from CTO Rob Taylor on the differences between traditional chip design methodologies compared with modern open-source approaches. We got to understand the benefits and challenges of each approach across various stages, including logic design and RTL Synthesis and optimization, all the way from physical design to layout.
Why Democratizing Chip Design is at the Heart of ChipFlow
In order to differentiate in the modern marketplace, OEMs are realising that off-the shelf hardware solutions just aren’t always sufficient enabling product innovation. To drive innovation a true hardware/software co-design approach needs to be established from the outset and ChipFlow platform is the first EDA platform with HW&SW co-design focus.
Thank you to our friends and partners
These few days engaging with the community would not have been possible without the support of our partners. The ChipFlow team would like to extend a massive thank you to Imec and Europractice for providing the platform to showcase our vision. We would also like to thank all of the presenters and all of the participants for giving their time to be involved.
What next?
We are already planning our upcoming workshops and events. To stay up to date make sure you connect with us on our LinkedIn page