A first look at Edalize for ASIC flows
Over the past years there has been a revolution in open source silicon. While there have been open source IP cores and open source chip design tooling available for at least 25 years, a lot of this has been disparate efforts. What we see now is that many of these projects are coming together as a tour de force creating a snowball effect of generating more projects and innovations being built from these earlier efforts. As I mentioned in my 2020 retrospective, we finally reached an important milestone last year where it’s now possible to create an ASIC using only open source code and tools. And within the limitations of the tools and technology this works just fine for one-off designs. Scaling this up has been a problem however. We see the same tasks being manually repeated and RTL files being copied over and over again instead of focusing on making more exciting end products.