Starting to like where this is going

It would be cool to see renders like that of my ASICs.

I can probably package up my scripts so you can convert and render your GDS! Will tidy up my mess when I get a minute :)

Amazing, that would be awesome. How long does it take to render?

Quite slowly. Several hours for a small clip like this (although I use Sheepit render farm to help speed up). The GDS-to-mesh conversion creates a toooon of triangles, and I like to use raytracing rendering, so it's pretty slow.

Oh fun, I imagine my RTX 5070 wouldn't be too happy with it.

Happier than my 4090! haha

Me too. What ASIC pipeline are you using? Did you write this render yourself?

LibreLane/OpenRoad for the RTL-to-GDS pipeline. Blender for visualization! Extracted GDS to obj hierarchy, then scripted a "tour" of between each of the modules in the chip.

Very cool. We're so lucky to live in a time where we have OpenRoad. I did TinyTapeout two years ago and it blew my mind how open source has taken over. Looking forward to the video!

Agreed! Amazing set of functionality that everyone can run and improve on. And surprisingly powerful! Just sent another chip to the fab (not this one) and did some customization of the Librelane pipeline to suit my design. Was very straightforward!

will you cover the tinkering in a video? I'm wondering what changes you needed to make: bug fixes, features, both?

Probably not this first video, but definitely in the followups! The first video (and chip) was 100% newbie learning curve, but the second chip was more sophisticated wrt tweaking. Biggest change was auto-macro placement + PDN wiring. And better timing closure debugging

Very cool! Nice work

Yo bro, what the hell are you doing?

Prepping for a video!

Silicon cities and superhighways. Nice work!

Bro is exploring microchips like a woman's body

Oof

what is it?

modern building