180 nm ASIC plan for Oct 2020

NOTE: moved to Jun 9th 2021 (sigh should not have put a date in the page name, oh well)

This page is for discussion of what we can aim for and reasonably achieve. To be expanded with links to bugreports

Links:

Minimum viability

  • a Wishbone interface.  this allows us to drop directly into already-written Litex "SOC" infrastructure (leaving all of us free to focus on the essentials)
  • the dependency matrices are essential.
  • a Branch Function Unit is essential (minimum of 1)
  • Load/Store Function Units are essential
  • so are multiple register file files (SPRs, Condition Regs, 32x INT Regs)
  • the integer pipelines (integer and logic instructions) are essential (the FP ones not so much) https://bugs.libre-soc.org/show_bug.cgi?id=305
  • a very very basic Branch Prediction system (fixed, but observing POWER branch "hints")
  • a very very basic Common Data Bus infrastructure.
  • a TLB and MMU are not strictly essential (not for a proof-of-concept ASIC)
  • neither in some ways is a L1 cache
  • interfaces we need as a bare minimum include JTAG, GPIO, EINT, SPI and QSPI, I2C, UART16550, LPC (from Raptor Engineering) and that actually might even be it.
  • ls180 actual auto-generated pinouts by pinmux program

Secondary priorities

  • a PLL (this is quite a lot however it turns the ASIC from a 24mhz design into a 300mhz design)
  • a TLB and MMU (in combination with a PLL if it is GNU/Linux OS capable we have an actual viable saleable product, immediately)
  • dual L1 Caches with the 2x 128-bit-wide L0CacheBuffer to merge 8x LD/STs
  • multiple Common Data Buses to / from the RegFile along with a 4x "Striped" HI/LO-32-ODD/EVEN access pattern.
  • multi-issue
  • PartitionedSignal-based integer pipelines
  • an FP regfile and associated FP pipelines
  • SV compliance
  • 128x INT/FP registers
  • GPU-style opcodes - Jacob mentioned Texturisation opcodes as being more important than e.g. SIN/COS.
  • additional interfaces such as RGB/TTL, SDRAM, HyperRAM, RGMII, SD/MMC, USB-ULPI
  • a pinmux
  • FSI instead of JTAG

Available people

Preliminary coriolis2 ASIC layout

02jul2020 - first version

03jul2020 - DIV unit added

28dec2020 - End of year progress update

With blockage layers

Without blockage layers so wires can be seen more clearly