Open Source Analog ASIC design: Entire Process
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- Опубліковано 26 тра 2024
- To get the scoop on all the stuff that doesn't make it into videos, check out: psychogenic.ck.page/
I got to play with all this thanks to the Zero To ASIC Analog course beta--there's a waiting list for the next round bit.ly/analog-waitlist
This crash course shows you everything that goes into creating mixed signal and analog ASICs, using free and open source tools, and the open Skywater 130 PDK. I'll cover some background and the entire flow that got me to tape out an ADC, along with impressions, information and tips that are geared towards anyone coming from a digital, or PCB circuit design background.
In the tutorial I touch on some basic theory, cover schematic capture and simulation with xschem, layout using magic, parasitic extraction, more simulation, including digital blobs in your analog circuits for mixed-signal and putting everything in a padring.
These are all things you can do right now, on your home computer, by installing the free tools or thanks to a virtual machine that includes all the tools pre-packaged for you (link below). If you want to actually get a physical chip out of your efforts, TinyTapeout now supports mixed signal and analog designs in addition to digital, for a cost that is orders of magnitude below what it was just a few years ago.
The sky130 process is a bit older, but if you're doing analog these are the sizes you want to be playing in anyway, so it's win-win for us: cheaper and perfect for the task.
Whether you want to start down the path of becoming an analog chip designer, would like a greater understanding of the tradeoffs involved in creating circuits down to the atomic level, or wish to master simulation and up your game when creating PCB-level electronics, these tools and the tinytapeout process and community make it all possible.
I hope to put out focused videos, to really get into the bits I didn't have time to cover, namely on xschem schematic capture and layout with magic. I've done a lot of customizing and scripting and think it'll be worth sharing. Let me know if there are any bits you'd like to see more focus on.
Useful references from the video:
Tiny Tapeout: tinytapeout.com
Zero To ASIC Analog Course waiting list:
bit.ly/analog-waitlist
Virtual Machine with all the tools: github.com/TinyTapeout/analog...
Analog schematic capture & simulation with Stefan Schippers: • Webinar - Analog schem...
My talk at Latch-up: • "Tiny Tapeout: custom ...
Fifty Nifty Variations of Two-Transistor Circuit | Harald Pretl: • Fifty Nifty Variations...
SkyWater SKY130 PDK: skywater-pdk.readthedocs.io/e...
xschem: xschem.sourceforge.io/stefan/...
magic VLSI: opencircuitdesign.com/magic/
ngspice: ngspice.sourceforge.io/ - Наука та технологія
Dude your content is amazing
Wow: thanks!! :D
@@PsychogenicTechnologies Yeah it's a total joy to listen to your stuff!
@@Fazzwrld That's great to hear: I know the topic is interesting (at least to us, hah) but am still working on how to best share it, and a comment like this helps a lot (both in morale and direction)
@@PsychogenicTechnologies I totally agree with the other person. I’m an electrical engineer (in the making) for microwave technology, but I have never dabbled into the world of ASIC design. Very interesting and good presentation halfway into the video.
@@CSTEnjoyer Hello, and welcome both to the channel and to the ee world! Thanks a lot. Microwave--nice. I've always had a pull towards RF, and have worked on some things but never quite enough. The great news for both of us is that even if the GPIO on the TT chips is relatively slow, you can get really fast on the inside of these things--even with the older sky130 tech (low) GHz is supposed to be doable. I'm currently playing with my ADC and working on some power stuff, but with that under my belt I'm going to start playing with the high freqs.
Thanks again, cheers!
Gosh, there's so much knowledge in your videos. It clarified so many things I never really understood of ASIC design. Seriously, thank you for doing this.
I simply could not receive more encouraging feedback than this--thank you so much!
Which parts I liked? Everything. From content to presentation and from editing to your energy. Keep it up, amazing work.
That's great to hear, many thanks Bob 😀I am, at this very minute, playing with stuff I'll be doing demos of in the next video (I'm so lucky to find everything I work on so much fun I want to keep doing and sharing it all the time). A bientot!
Every time you upload is a good time.
You're making my day, Benjamin. Thanks!
Please keep making these! This is fantastic and timely!
Thanks, that's great to hear! Putting out more is def the plan :-D See you soon
Mighty healthy dose of enthusiasm sprinkled with a lot of deep-level technical autism. You have earned my sub, my friend. 🤠
Victor, I find that a fitting, funny and oddly poetic description: love it, I think I'll use it a my linkedin bio, hah!
Thanks for the comment, welcome and I hope to keep putting out stuff that you appreciate. Cheers.
I actually found the whole thing rather fascinating. I'm pretty good when it comes to discrete components or actual tubes/valves but this is a whole extra level and something I've always been curious about. I'll definitely be going through the rest of your videos in the near future.
Valves! I've never gotten far, with valves. Well that's awesome--another cool tool for the belt.
Man, this is absolutely amazing. We could have more access to free tools like this and develop single ICs with lower prices using projects like this TinyTapout. Waiting for incoming videos. Thanks
Obrigado! TinyTapeout is a great place to try stuff out, and the tools are there and working on real projects big and small, but it does have some limitations on space and speed of I/O and such. However, some people in the TT discord are getting together to do a chipignite directly with efabless--costs a bigger chunk of money, of course, but there you really do control everything. Not saying 10k is cheap but it is imaginable--not some crazy quarter million dollars. And the more stuff we do, the more of us playing, the more we can start getting clout and reducing costs further. I'd say it's pretty good already and even better things are coming. cheers!
@@PsychogenicTechnologies as I’m from Brazil we face a lot of difficulties here in terms of import taxes and so on, but I see this as a great opportunity for a Master’s or doctors degree in an University for example. I had worked on front end design 15 years ago, but give up and now I’m working on others stuff. Are they using 130nm technology, aren’t they?Thanks
It would be a dream to have a community to develop chips here in Brazil.
Unfortunately our closed border policies regarding electronics make things way more difficult.
Wow, I'm going to need to rewatch this to be able to absorb it all! A lot of good stuff!!!
Thanks Alexander :-D
Fabio strikes again! Excellent video, very grateful for your videos!
hah! Grazie!
Super engaging, loving the content! Thanks for sharing and making ASIC design accessible to beginners ❤
Love to hear it Daniel, thanks! If I can open the door a bit and get others joining in on the fun, my work is done--so thanks again for the encouraging comment, am working on more goodies on this front. Cheers!
I just found your channel and I want to encourage you to continue making this type of content. Your presentation is great, and there is not much content I can find on such topics. I would love to see you do a few series say on KiCAD, PCB Design, High Speed Digital design, and low level analog design, and all the related tools. Keep up the GREAT work!
Hi! Welcome! This counts a lot, for me: it's great to hear and does encourage me to put in the time to make more. I'm already planning some more ASIC stuff, as well as KiCAD, that much is certain and the others are all actually topics I'm into, so I think it'd be fun to do and useful to share. Thanks again and keep an eye out, I hope to increase the pace of video production a little bit over the summer.
Hey, this was amazing, thanks for doing this videos with such a high quality for us, electronic nerds!
Yes! The e-nerds are who I live for: it's my tribe, hah! Thanks a lot for your comment, I appreciate it, and am glad you liked the vid. I'll be putting out more on this front in the not-too-distant future, though I'm still not certain of the ordering (I want to keep the kicad crew happy, too!)
Wow this is fantastic! I really appreciate how clearly you explained what the process is like, and where to expect frustrations. Now I have to give this a shot!
Awesome! That is exactly what I hope to hear when I started making this video 😀 Thanks a lot for your comment and do give it a go--it's just so easy to get started now. And then gets just as hard as you want it to, which I also find great. Have fun, cheers!
Your word economy is amazing. So concise. You grabbed me so fast too. Nice job.
Wow, thanks! Seems we share an appreciation for language or effective transmission of material, anyway. I'm often trying to get rather involved concepts across and, when I'm consuming them, I value precision first and information density a close second. I try and put some thought in how I'll present what I'm sharing, so your comment means a lot to me. Thanks again, cheers.
Such a great content! Got me really interested in learning more, thanks!
That's fantastic--and thank you! It's a whole world that's just there waiting for us to play!
Awesome video again. I've been following the open source ASIC/Tiny Tapeout space for a few months now and working on a digital design for TT07. But very curious about mixed signal design. This was a great overview for me a software developer turned circuit designer. Now I know what I need to learn more about to go deeper. Really cool stuff!!
Thanks Ben! It's super you'll be on the next run and if being set on the digital side means you'll only have one learning curve to confront for mixed signal next time 'round. We're on similar paths: professionally, I also went from software to hardware to wind up playing with chips. Means there's plenty of mystery left to explore in the whole analog design side of things, which is pretty exciting. I went rather blind, first time around, "thinking analog" but ignoring (and often being completely ignorant of) all the zillions of little effects that impact how real devices function down there. There are a lot, but if you're curious about how the universe works, it's fascinating to figure out. Good luck on TT07 (I still don't even know if I'll have time to submit my own, with all that's been going on!)
This was a great intro to the analog work flow! I've found it really difficult to find good resources for learning this side of the open source tools so I'm looking forward to watching this video through again with the tools up and ready to follow along.
Thanks for sharing this stuff! Looking forward to your future videos that get deeper into the weeds!
Thanks Calvin--I agree: what little I found was either too much of a basic intro and focus on installing stuff, or sometimes just too deep, and I was hoping to provide something that gives a overview while being useful. I live in the weeds and def want to share some more focused content, with a mix of the how and the why of bits I find particularly useful or interesting--a comment like this encourages me to actually get it done :)
Great work, all the transitions are awesome, don't know much about designing for silicon, so appreciate the primer on resistors/primers/inductors.
Thanks William! I'm working out exactly what I'll put in there, but I want to publish at least more detailed spice, xschem, and magic videos. Though magic will probably be the main one for talking about parasitics, all three feel like good spots to get into a mix of practical and more specific talk about the low-level components, how they're made, tradeoffs, matching all that good stuff.
Personally, I'm better at doing anything when I actually understand *why* so I try to reflect that in the content and want to get more on all that in the next ASIC-related vids. Your comment encourages me to let myself loose in that department :-D
dude the presentation is great, congratz
Hey, thanks!! :-D
I appreciate your wizardry and explanations, thanks!
That's great to hear, trying to get more of the out soon. Cheers!
I get lost for 1 second and the next second I get smacked in the face with jewels of information. Top Top !!! content
hahaha, that is great to hear and an awesome way to put it: going onto the resume, this one😄 Thanks!
Wow, awesome Video!
Many thanks, Sönke!
New subscriber! Best content ever in electronic design! Thank you Sir!
Wow, thanks Xavier! It's my pleasure to do these, especially when I know they're appreciated--so thanks again and I'll be making more!
you just make so many cool things... and god at explaining stuff.... very well done....
That's awesome to hear--thanks a lot, Finn :-D
This was awesome. Thanks!
Thank you!! super encouraging 😀
Well done!
This was really cool!
Thanks Nicholas!!
I love your channel! Keep going! 😎🤖
Thanks so much: I put in some effort making these things, so knowing they're appreciated is very encouraging. Cheers!
Love this channel
Thanks Mordecai/Pinto!! 😀The comment is much appreciated. Cheers
awesome video
vielen dank! :-D
I really enjoyed this, and I made it all the way through to the end.
To that end, here's *why* I enjoyed it. Back in my '86-87 ish 2nd - 3rd year university classes, we did some units on VLSI design, standard text being as you might expect.
We learnt about design rules, components and had an assignment to put together a small hand-checked library, and be able to draw these ito a layout.
It was cool, but seeing this actually become an accessible to Jo Everyhobbiest thing is incredible, thought yes, it's kinda of been 'accessible' at the university level for a while.
Thanks for your videos. Any 'surprising' applications of these techniques? What applications of analog ASIC design are most 'happening' or most under the radar right-now?
Thanks! That's pretty awesome: I didn't get any opportunity like that at uni (wrong program, but not even sure they offered anyone) but the fact that it's now possible both let me play and is one of the reasons I make this sort of content, just so more people will know about it, see that it's doable and join the fun. With loads of people working in parallel and cross-pollinating crazy cool stuff can happen.
As for what's going on, there's more than I can manage to keep track of. Of course AI related things but application specific compute is one way to squeeze out more juice as we hit the bottom of possible granularity and the end of Moore's law, so as it looks to be exploding everywhere. One thing that got that piqued my curiosity with all this was a contract I did with a company doing analog neural nets (in essence shoving charge into the gate insulator, to change the Vth, to basically weight the neuron): makes the computation extremely low power, so you wind up being able to stuff ML into the *components* on the edge. I thought that was pretty cool.
@@PsychogenicTechnologies Spiked Neural Nets ?
Quite a good video. It reminds me the book "Asics design in the silicon sandbox" Keith Elliott Barr. Best regards from France.
Oh no: another book on the reading list! hah There wasn't one with a focus on mixed-signal in my stack, this is great. And the funny thing is, I've been getting lots out of books that are a bit older--on one hand, because the physics hasn't changed but on the other the sky130 is an... ahem... mature process, well suited to analog/mixed-signal. Merci Nicolas (tu m'rappel que j'm'ennuie de Paris)
God, I am missing my long mane. Just subbed your channel and gonna watch this.
hah, not exactly what I was expecting/hoping to inspire, but hey, I'll take it too :-D Welcome, enjoy the vid, and should have more related stuff on the way soon.
More of these type of vids please
Hey Bram, thanks for the comment and *yes* more coming as fast as I can get them done and edited, while still actually keeping clients satisfied :)
This is just great!!!
You have explained the workflow way better than many others.
Looking forward to see more content from you.
Maybe a more intertwined AMS? 😅
Thanks a million Gabriel--that's super encouraging :) Willing to try for more AMS but... what's AMS? Too many TLAs for me to hold 'em all, hah
@@PsychogenicTechnologies Sorry, my bad 😅
Actually, one of the most confusing parts of these workflows are the Three Letter Abbreviations 🤣
AMS stands for Analog and Mixed Signals, basically your whole project including the digital part of it 😉👍
@@gabrielbarrientos468 Hahah, yes, IDK, TBH IRL I use them a whole lot, LOL.
Ah, yeah, I want to talk a good deal more about mixed signal--to me, that's where all the power of this stuff is, leveraging the goodness of both sides!
@@PsychogenicTechnologies can't agree more
Looking forward to see more content and new adventures from your side
This side of youtube is awesome!!!!
Aid, thanks! This inspires me to make more for the youtube geekdom!
I wish I could dip my toes in a lot of this stuff but I have no EE knowledge. Still great video and loved it through the end.
Hi! We've had workshops with people going from no knowledge to tapeout in 3 hours, no joke. Curiosity is all it takes--if you really do know nothing about it, checkout the design guide on tinytapeout.com/digital_design/wokwi/
It uses wokwi, a browser based playground, so 0 install and you can just try stuff out, and the guide walks you through the basics of digital design. If you're tempted, can be a fun evening. If you really get into it, you can actually tapeout but there's nothing forcing you to go that far.
Love this video! Looking to build ASIC skills and trying TinyTapeout projects soon, so your videos are a goldmine. Any advice for an undergrad trying to learn RF/Mixed Signal ASIC design?
Thanks Rohit! Basic advice is "play" -- get xschem, start doing experiments in simulation. But then, yeah, this goes so (so) deep, you could write a thesis on track width and tradeoffs, and when you get into the FETs well, feels like the level of interesting goes on forever. Also, some of these are beginner or intermediate projects, but TT has a number of RF things in the last two tapeouts--oscillators, a gilbert cell based double balanced mixer, lots of things. So, if you do want to take a look, you can just clone those repos and see how they're built, tweak things, see the impact, improve the projects themselves or use them as building block (say you take the mixer as a module and dev an env detector or fm demod, that should be fun).
This is very interresting. Digital is very useful analog is beautiful. I guess I stick with tht though since analog doesn't require so many components most often and many things just need special components.
That's a nice way of putting it! I'm still working on getting my analog creations to be streamlined to the point of beautiful, but it sure has been lots of fun.
Thank you!!!
Glad you like: I hope it's useful and that, if you haven't done this flow yet, it encourages you to go for it and helps you get started 😀
Cool work - You have put me out of work 🙂
hah, since you're saying it with a smile, I'm hoping that means you can focus on other cool bits!
Thanks :-D
@@PsychogenicTechnologies Yes I spend too much time trying to push open source into our universities here in Denmark. From now I just need to point them to your videos.
Inspiring
Thanks! I hope to put out some more, including some challenge-based learning experiences you may particularly enjoy ;-)
I appreciate the comment, cheers
Thanks for the overview, this is very helpful. A bit annoying to get everything setup, either you run a virtual amchine or try to get those old tools to play nice with your distro, still very far away from the state of where kicad is. Hopefully more people join the space and we can get some standardization going on
Thanks! Yeah, I used to insist on getting things working on the bare metal of my machine, but with everything interacting with the PDK and between themselves, and everything in dev at the same time, it can get pretty awful.
So the VM was the easiest way for me, and it worked well. Something I haven't tried yet but that looks pretty good is another packaged solution, but using docker (which might be lighter than running in a VM? I dunno).
This is another Harald Pretl thing, and it's well maintained: it's the iic-osic-tools,
hub.docker.com/r/hpretl/iic-osic-tools
Might be worth checking out.
I watched for awhile then you mentioned 'magic'. Magic? We were using magic when I got my PhD in analog circuit design in 1990 time frame. After all these 30+ years, what you showed here doesn't look that much different. I checked out TTO, wow, a tile is only $300 for a packaged bonded out part. That's amazing! Back then, we'd get back a wafer, blah blah, not going to bore you reminiscing. Hey thanks for the video and the time travel back to my youth. Good luck, have fun and may your ASIC function as designed.
Here's good reference for you "Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science and Personalities" by Jim Williams. PDF is easy to find.
That was a very good book. I used to occasionally pass by Bob Pease's cubicle when I used to work at National Semiconductor.
@@RevolutionEDA That's cool, you must be old school like me. I was going to mention Pease's "What all this *** stuff , anyhow?" series.
Hi Craig! Yeah, magic--and I don't think its changed all that much, on the surface anyway. And we're on sky130, which was cutting edge... a good while back. What has changed is just how easy it is to play along, now. I didn't get the chance to do this in skewl, so I'm loving the opportunity to try something different every couple of months--nuts. It's great to be living in the future.
Looks like you've been concentrating on macro scale tools (another something I still don't know but am curious about). If you want to detour down to the atoms, well you've got a head start with all the familiar tooling.
Thanks for the comment and mini-reminiscing, cheers!
@@PsychogenicTechnologies @RevolutionEDA I went the analog route because I was music/stereo guy. At GT 88-93, I specialized in device modeling and circuit simulation (PE Allen advisor, CMOS red book). After graduation, I didn't want my passion to be my career. Did a UT aerospace post-doc in CFD supercomputing then started my career. Never had a full-time job, only consulting/contracting at start-ups or small companies, sometimes embedded hardware design. I wrote the first Embedded Linux book in 2022. I've had a wonderful career and like to keep current. Then your video popped up, I checked out TTO and was amazed. Things sure have changed in the past 30 yrs. Anyway, thanks again. I'm easy to find if you have other questions.
Great video, especially liked magic related scripts to toggle layers and run pex etc. Any chance they can be shared ?
Thanks! Yes, I put some time into getting it to work in a way I find usable both with key mappings (no, just no: ctrl-s really does need to be "save", lol) and scripts, and I just need to document and put online--will def be doing along with a magic-specific video
Excellent content. Do you have a beginners guide to installing and setting up the tools etc ?
Thanks! There are a few ways to do this, but really virtualbox and the VM on github.com/TinyTapeout/analog-virtualbox-vm-sky130a are what I've used for this, so far--all the analog tools are in there.
I'll talk about the tweaks I did in xschem and magic videos, but that's all optional.
@@PsychogenicTechnologies Thanks. Managed to get the tools installed from github. Plugging away at it now...
@@pentachronic Ah, that's great to hear! Welcome to the teeeeeny, have fun
6:20 Tcl is more then just "a little weird", it's plain insidious, especially how it's aliasing works is just plain devilish, but worse, most people don't even realize how bad it is until it's too late, which is after you've seen how it can undermine any kind of potential for rational inquiry of any program semantics, which usually happens at the far too late stage because it's not obviously a bad language, on its surface it's the most friendly, practical & easy to use language, it just has this nightmarish string-substitution system on top of everything which seems to come out of a theoretical computer scientist's fever dream which undermines everything.
Ever used Glade (from peardrop design)? I'm having some trouble in the layout part and might switch to your setup
I haven't: I actually started the whole ASIC journey when I found out there were open source alternatives to Cadence (which I didn't use but heard about pricing and endless complaining about from the teams using it). Had I known about Glade, might have poked around sooner... now: am liking the OSS stuff, and there's something about having a tool that powerful and free but not perfect that *I* can actually contribute to and make better that really hooks me.
I'll tell you up front that the learning curve, to me, was steeper than normal. I was coming in from PCB land, so that accounts for some of it, but magic has a particular way of doing things that I find philosophically pleasing but seems different than "standard". I cannot tell, but am told, that klayout functions more like other things, so you might have a peek at that if you find magic too alien.
$5 says this guy knows how to make a guitar peddle and grows his own vegtables.
Hah, I am *such* a stereotype. Right on both fronts, though it's been a while for the guitar peddles.
@@PsychogenicTechnologies Right on! I learned a TON from your video by the way, I don't know how the algo. works but it picked me up from a long way away, I certainly wasn't looking to build an ASIC haha, never used KiCAD or SPICE etc, but just watching you use the software is very reassuring somehow, it's normally so intimidating!
If we can use and link KiCAD schematics with a microelectronic layout tools will be an amazing using a plugin or others things, I think!
Yeah, one of the first things I did was create a quick way to import all the standard cells into kicad by generating a library for those schematic parts, and that worked well, but magic really kills as it's so specialized--would be tough to get something like that with pcbnew, and I've come to think that it's a question of the right tool for the job. I *love* kicad, but after getting over the bump am finding that xschem and magic really are pretty good when you're down at the level of MOSFETs.
Have you ever played with BiCMOS logic?
I’m interested in it because of [relatively] recent developments in heterojunction bipolar transistors.
I have not. However, from what I gather, IHP's newly open process is BiCMOS--not sure that TT will support it, at least right away, but it's happening right now and pretty interesting. They have settled on klayout, I think, in terms of doing layout, rather than magic but in any case the PDK is open and they seem very motivated to get us involved. I was at latch-up a month or two ago, and Frank Vater gave a talk you might be interested in: ua-cam.com/video/abAmUjBE60M/v-deo.html
(a lot of the talks on the FOSSi channel from the conference are pretty interesting).
Would it be possible.. to take the spice output and convert it to verilog/vhdl for fpga physical testing?! Or even turn from xschem output to Amaranth?
I don't have any experience with this, and have wondered myself, but your question pushed me over the edge and I finally did a little search. We are not the first to think of this, it seems. Lots of the results are, however, really old. But I think some digging might reveal interesting things... This one
github.com/Eyantra698Sumanto/Spice-to-Verilog-Converter
looks really dumb and basic, and I can't say I've tried it or how it would react to raw mosfets... may look it to this further (but the stack is so deep, hah)
@@PsychogenicTechnologies i had a suspicion that this should have been done before. But might be problematic to go from analog circuit descriptions to Verilog, but i'm thinking a digital concept should translate bit easier. A good starting point prob. would be to make a simple circuit for a digital comparator and then make the same in Amaranth and try making a ... a parser/translator that route.. (oh my brain now are hurting and speeding at the same time).. The idea of taking your asic design and somewhat able to "verify it" in a fpga kinda makes sense to me for some reason.
Am I correct to assume that by magic software you mean Magic VLSI? (& not Image Magick nor MagickQ software)
Application Specific Integrated Circuit.
The free pdk is good its not modelled well, very difficult to use gmid method bcs vth changes in svt devices are wild
analogue asics!!!
yeeeesssss, so cool :D
Evildragon, where did you accent go?
After all this time, you've tracked me down! I was advised to appeal to a wider audience, a creamy canadian-neutral would do the trick. heh
Magic is a 50 years old tool. It is pushed not to endanger the EDA tripoly.
Well that's an intriguing claim... I mean, I don't think age is as important as relevance (Linux is 33 or something and am guessing it'll be going strong at 50) but regardless... on one hand, with IHP settling on klayout for their open PDK, am guessing there will be some progress on more modern tooling and it looks like the tripoly isn't holding everyone in check even if it were true. On the other: I've actually come to like the tool, ugly as it may look (the only things I care about are availability and openness) and from what I gather magic's "way of thinking" is pretty divergent from the big tools (at least more so than eg klayout), so using it actually increases the barrier for me to give up and go purchase some fat tool's per-seat license. Finally, I see you are also offering tooling, so with magic, klayout and Revolution EDA in the field, feels like there's pressure for advancement, and innovation--that's a win, from the user perspective. Of course, I'm still pretty new to this world, so what do I know.
@@PsychogenicTechnologies Magic was an old tool even 30 years ago and the code base has not changed much in the last four decades. KLayout is an excellent GDS editor but doesn't have the concept design libraries. Linux is indeed 33 years old, but I don't think any of the original code is left in the present Linux code base. Semiconductor startups are choked thanks to very expensive software tools, but asking them to use Magic because it is open source is not the solution. Revolution EDA is not targeting enthusiasts but hopes to be useful to SMEs.
@@RevolutionEDA I just left a similar comment about magic age and how what he showed here isn't that much different from my 1990 experience.
@@CraigHollabaugh There is a fallacy in open-source enthusiasts that anything open-source is gold. To be honest, I wasted so much time on Linux over the years that I could have bought hundreds of Windows licenses with that money. Just because you don't pay for a license does not mean that it doesn't cost you.
@@RevolutionEDA You're right, open-source has its place but it does come with a cost. I started on Sun 3 around 1988, then Sun 4 Sparcstations. Hopped to Linux 1994 slackware 1.0. I agree, Linux was a real pain in the early days (sound, video and ethernet drivers) and all the distros blah blah blah. Today, I continually switch between Ubuntu and Win10/11. I can work all day with WSL/XServer without productivity loss.
What kind of sorcery is this?
The best kind: the kind you can try at home! (btw, it's pronounce "levio-SAH") 😀