ORConf 2019 was celebrating 20 years of Open Silicon this year in Bordeaux, France. Olof Kindgren gave a great overview of the events so far, with people looking forward to the best ORConf yet.
The conference, organised by The FOSSi Foundation, had over 40 presentations covering everything from Hardware licensing, Chisel, RISCV, nextpnr to Open Source supercomputers and more.
Symbiotic EDA was well represented with updates on ASICone, Formal Verification of AXI and the use of GHDL with SymbiYosys.
Pepijn de Vos, our newest intern gave a great talk about the use of GHDL with SymbiYosys for formal verification. He showed how using Formal Verification found an edge case bug in the ALU of his VHDL CPU. Watch the whole talk here and for more information check his recent blog post. Pepijn also made ORConf history by being the first person to present his slides direct from an FPGA!
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Dan Gisselquist of ZipCPU fame, presented his latest findings on verifying the big vendor’s AXI Lite cores. While AXI is a very powerful bus protocol, a simple mistake can lead to a whole design hanging. Another common mistake is limiting throughput to just 25% of what is achievable. Dan found the bugs using the Open Source Formal Verification tools provided by Symbiotic EDA. His message to AXI users: make sure you verify AXI cores - even if they are provided by the big name vendors! His talk is online here, and the slides are here.
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Last year, Symbiotic EDA announced ASICone, an experiment to tape-out an entire ASIC with a RISC-V 32bit processor, using only Open Source tools. Luis Eduardo Rueda Guerrero presented what has been achieved so far and what gaps remain. Watch his talk online for all the details.
Symbiotic EDA is excited to continue making contributions to the fast growing world of Open Source Silicon. Here’s to the next 20 years!
Thanks to Andrew Back and Florian Woh for permission to use their photos.