Видео

Hi! What I did for this was look at which version, specifically, had been setup for the analog tools in the VM (easy to tell, since all the $PDK_ROOT etc env variables point to it). Then, I had a system with openlane (github.com/efabless/openlane) already installed, I switched to that and just sync'ed the PDKs using `volare enable --pdk <pdk>`. I'm not *certain* this was required, but it sure can't hurt. Finally, did face some issues in getting the GDS created by the digital hardening into the mixed signal... put my hints on that here: github.com/psychogenic/tt06-analog-wowa/tree/main/openlane Good luck!

Cool, that should be a really interesting project

That's great to hear, thanks!!

Nice... am working on showing up here more consistently, but main focus is to try and make it worth your time. Cheers :)

Yeah, that does fit with what I've been thinking of--thanks for the suggestion :)

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.

Thanks! Took a quick look at your mag trap filtration system... that's pretty cool! Have always been curious about the wet sciences: a highlight experience at uni was a molecular bio class where I saw (stained) DNA with my own eyes... and the smaller things get, the less you can differentiate between wet and dry, anyway. Thanks again, cheers!

@@PsychogenicTechnologies Cool, thanks for checking it out. Wet stuff does have some interesting properties. I think of DNA, and its compiler the ribosome, as a programming language for atoms. Too bad its way too tricky and powerful. I also think the sciences are converging and its probably not so productive anymore to say where one begins and the other ends.

haha, sorry Maria: sometimes I'm a bit heavy on the gas. I'm told more than 7/10 people eventually recuperate and watch another of my videos 😀

hahaha, that is great to hear and an awesome way to put it: going onto the resume, this one😄 Thanks!

Hey, thanks!! :-D

Valves! I've never gotten far, with valves. Well that's awesome--another cool tool for the belt.

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!

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 :)

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.

Aid, thanks! This inspires me to make more for the youtube geekdom!

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!

Obviously the situation has felt dismal. Had invested numerous calendar years into learning native Apple platform software engineering, and had been interviewing for engineering positions at Apple prior to that. After that incident though, Apple hasn’t contacted Me to interview for any. (Regardless of having thankfully successfully passed Apple coding interview sessions involving pointers and binary trees, although was mainly applying for positions doing iOS and iPadOS app engineering) My body is White and I am straighter than an arrow though, regardless of the long hairstyle. So I don’t fit any “diversity quotas” at Apple.

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.

Thank you!! super encouraging 😀

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!

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

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!

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.

That's fantastic--and thank you! It's a whole world that's just there waiting for us to play!

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.

Many thanks, Sönke!

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.

Thanks, that's great to hear! Putting out more is def the plan :-D See you soon

Thanks Mordecai/Pinto!! 😀The comment is much appreciated. Cheers

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.

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.

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.

Thanks Nicholas!!

Thanks! I hope to put out some more, including some challenge-based learning experiences you may particularly enjoy ;-) I appreciate the comment, cheers

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

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

Thanks so much: I put in some effort making these things, so knowing they're appreciated is very encouraging. Cheers!

vielen dank! :-D

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.

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

yeeeesssss, so cool :D

It is really dumb, but you need the "full name"... I bet that's the problem. If the name is global, like a power flag, I bet it works. For things like labels, let's say you made ENABLE_WIDGET, a label in the top schem page. well, duh, the name is /ENABLE_WIDGET, so /EN* would work, etc. This is 'cause you have /path/to/LABEL in the hierarchy, nothing works without the / and even I forget that and get bitten. Hopefully that solves it for you.