The problem with open source IP
As an open source hardware advocate, founder member of both YosysHQ and ChipFlow and creator of the Zero to ASIC course, I’m invested in the future of open source EDA tools and ASICs. I spend time thinking about the journey ahead, and what I can do to help move us on.
We seem to be doing well with the tooling, yes there is a lot of room for improvement in comparison with the industry standard big names, but there is a lot of demand for chips that don’t need every last drop of PPA squeezed out from the silicon! And we already have multiple options - OpenLane, SiliconCompiler and Coriolis2 are all producing GDS that can be taped out right now.
Looking ahead, we will surely see demand for easy to configure SoCs that can pull in components from a library of IP and then get ordered easily. Focussing for now on the digital side (yes the analog part is a whole other question), what could we do now to help ensure we have a library of high quality, silicon proven designs?
Here are some existing attempts to catalogue IP:
Librecores: https://www.librecores.org/
Opencores: https://opencores.org/
Efabless IP index: https://github.com/efabless/skywater-pdk-central/blob/main/design-ip.md
One funny story is that YosysHQ used example cores from one of the above sites to stress test Yosys as the RTL is generally so poorly written!
So to get the discussion started, here’s a suggestion from me. How about we create a github action and put it in the github marketplace. Your IP is a repo that subscribes to this action, and on every commit you get a nice set of shiny status badges that show the following is present and working:
Documentation
Unit tests
Coverage
Formal verification on bus interfaces
Licensing information
Silicon proven
An obvious problem here is that in reality it’s very difficult, if not impossible to judge the quality of code with automatic tests.
So what else could we do? Perhaps engage the community to vote with github stars? As an author, if your IP makes it to silicon you get a free sample or a nice GDS print?
I’m looking forward to reading your ideas and comments!
