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Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

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21–30 of 46 posts

Re: Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

#21
post #18

Nice specs! Looking forward to seeing how this and the other projects on Waferspace goes. Being able to produce 1k chips at a reasonable price will hopefully do wonders for open hardware / open silicon.

Yep, Aegis's Terra 1 is designed to be "good enough" for the first generation. I do plan on expanding the Terra family of FPGA's if there's enough interest. I do want to work my way up to 100k LUT's.

Re: Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

#22
post #7

[dead]

How do you verify that the fab produces the design authentically? They could create a security vulnerability only they know how to exploit.

Because you can just look into it and see if it's what you sent fof production, and if not and the word gets out you are done as a fab. Fab business is about trust. You also should trust that your design isn't leaked to the competition.

It's very common to xray the dies, especially for debugging. Also common is to etch it layer by layer, take photos and rebuild the circuit schematic, mainly for reverse engineering but I've seen companies doing it to their own dies too.

Things get more blurry at the board level, the combinations of suppliers and service providers are endless.

Re: Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

#23
post #12

We make an asynchronous sea of gates runtime reconfigurable gate array chip very different from FPGA's but with the same use cases https://github.com/fiberhood/MorphleLogic/blob/main/README_M... The problem is you can make test chips like Aegis for around $10 (depending on the yield, on how many of the first 1000 chips actually work) but they are just that, test chips. In the case of Morphle Logic we make wafer scale…

12 GHz on 180nm? Sorry, that's not possible. What's the actual clock speed?

Re: Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

#24
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you verify that the fab produces the design authentically? They could create a security vulnerability only they know how to exploit.

Because you can just look into it and see if it's what you sent fof production, and if not and the word gets out you are done as a fab. Fab business is about trust. You also should trust that your design isn't leaked to the competition. It's very common to xray the dies, especially for debugging. Also common is to etch it layer by layer, take photos and rebuild the circuit schematic, mainly for reverse engineering bu…

Is it possible to resolve features on advanced nodes with xray machines? Or the etch and photograph method?

Re: Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

#25
post #18

Nice specs! Looking forward to seeing how this and the other projects on Waferspace goes. Being able to produce 1k chips at a reasonable price will hopefully do wonders for open hardware / open silicon.

Yep, Aegis's Terra 1 is designed to be "good enough" for the first generation. I do plan on expanding the Terra family of FPGA's if there's enough interest. I do want to work my way up to 100k LUT's.

What are your thoughts on including a RISC-V hardcore along with the gates? Because for almost all projects I can imagine using FPGA for, I would want a microcontroller also. This might however be slightly colored by me being a software/firmware first type of electronics engineer. Thinking especially for the smaller gate counts, like under 10k - because there a soft CPU takes up very precious resources.

Re: Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

#26
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, Aegis's Terra 1 is designed to be "good enough" for the first generation. I do plan on expanding the Terra family of FPGA's if there's enough interest. I do want to work my way up to 100k LUT's.

What are your thoughts on including a RISC-V hardcore along with the gates? Because for almost all projects I can imagine using FPGA for, I would want a microcontroller also. This might however be slightly colored by me being a software/firmware first type of electronics engineer. Thinking especially for the smaller gate counts, like under 10k - because there a soft CPU takes up very precious resources.

I've definitely had a thought about doing a hard core RISC-V SoC on a dev board.

Re: Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

#27
post #23
post #12

We make an asynchronous sea of gates runtime reconfigurable gate array chip very different from FPGA's but with the same use cases https://github.com/fiberhood/MorphleLogic/blob/main/README_M... The problem is you can make test chips like Aegis for around $10 (depending on the yield, on how many of the first 1000 chips actually work) but they are just that, test chips. In the case of Morphle Logic we make wafer scale…

12 GHz on 180nm? Sorry, that's not possible. What's the actual clock speed?

Morphle Logic is asynchronous logic so there is no clock.

At 110nm I measured when a transistor was switching the second transistor on its output. I can prove it, can you disprove it?

A consistent 12Ghz signal cascade was (repeatedly) tested and confirmed on a 28nm asynchronous chip [1].

Why would it be impossible? [2].

We measure 800 Ghz and teraherz clocks on niobium superconducting Josephson Junctions [3,4,5].

[1] https://byrdsight.com/asynchronous-technology-has-its-time-f... ( See also on the slides in the video talk)

[2] "If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong." - Arthur C. Clarke

[3] Ivan Sutherland Keynote Single Flux Quantum SFQ Ditigal Electronics Digital circuits totally distinct from Quan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMVV3ErGSVY

[4] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jerome-Pety/publication...

[5] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&qsp=3&q=...

Re: Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

#28
post #18

Nice specs! Looking forward to seeing how this and the other projects on Waferspace goes. Being able to produce 1k chips at a reasonable price will hopefully do wonders for open hardware / open silicon.

1k chips for $4000 or $7000 at 180nm is (a lot) more expensive than 180nm at MOSIS or Europractice, I wound not call it reasonable, especially because the EDA software tools and PDK used are inferior.

Re: Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

#29
post #12

We make an asynchronous sea of gates runtime reconfigurable gate array chip very different from FPGA's but with the same use cases https://github.com/fiberhood/MorphleLogic/blob/main/README_M... The problem is you can make test chips like Aegis for around $10 (depending on the yield, on how many of the first 1000 chips actually work) but they are just that, test chips. In the case of Morphle Logic we make wafer scale…

VU19P = 3M gates how? It has more than 3M LUTs and each LUT is certainly > 1 gate

Re: Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon

#30
Is there a way in the DSP (that's the only one I looked at) to instead of going through a mux at the end just put the output flop optionally in a transparent mode if registering isn't enabled? I don't know if that's possible with the tooling but it seems like it'd save resources and reduce fanout.
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