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Submitting a chipIgnite Project

Published by Team Efabless on

Program Overview

The chipIgnite program enables you to rapidly design and fabricate your own custom chip easily and affordably. Projects leverage an open-source chip framework for hosting your own design within a 10 sq mm user area. You can use your own EDA tools or leverage an open-source automated design flow for hardening your digital design.

Once you reserve your slot on a shuttle, you complete your design and upload it to the Efabless platform. After successfully completing pre-checks on your final project design files, your project is submitted to the foundry for fabrication along with others on the same shuttle.

Wafers are returned from the foundry, diced and packaged into chips. You are sent the final chips for your project along with 5 assembled test boards for evaluating your new chip design.

Instructions

Step 1 — Register on the Efabless platform using your choice of LinkedIn, Google or GitHub.

Step 2 — Pay a $200 deposit to reserve your project slot on the shuttle using PayPal or a credit card.

Step 3 — Create a project on the Efabless platform.

  1. Start your project by cloning the Caravel User Project git repo and follow the documentation to complete and integrate your design.
  2. You may either upload a gzipped tar archive (‘tar.gz’) of provide a public git repo URL (if you project is not private).
  3. You can update your project design files by re-uploading a new gzipped tar archive or re-syncing your git repo URL on the platform.

Step 4 — Create a request for your project on the shuttle.

Step 5 — Complete the list of steps on the instructions tab for your request. This includes:

  • accepting the terms of service,
  • completing an export certification form,
  • providing your shipping information,
  • successfully passing a precheck job on the platform with the final design files.

Step 6 — Once your project design is final and the above list is complete, change the ‘Submitter’ confirmed status on the request form to indicate your project is ready.

When the shuttle is ready to be submitted to the foundry, you will be required to pay the balance of your shuttle fee. Parts and boards will be sent to you based on the estimated delivery date for the shuttle.

Primary Resources

Caravel User Project: https://github.com/efabless/caravel_user_project

OpenLane Digital Design Flow: https://github.com/efabless/openlane

Shuttle Precheck Tool: https://github.com/efabless/open_mpw_precheck

SkyWater Open PDK: https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk

Caravel (full project): https://github.com/efabless/caravel

Other Resources