/Vlsir

Interchange formats for chip design.

Primary LanguagePythonBSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" LicenseBSD-3-Clause

Vlsir

Interchange formats for chip design.

Vlsir defines data schema for integrated circuit (IC) circuits, layouts, and simulations, using Google's Protocol Buffer schema definition language.

The name Vlsir is a merger of VLSI (very large scale integration - a way-outdated chip-world acronym) and IR (intermediate representation - the term every cool-kid copying compiler designers uses nowadays).

Contents

All of Vlsir's schema-definitions live in the protos directory.

Schema Description
Circuit Circuit / Hardware Descriptions
Raw Layout "Raw Polygon" IC Layout
Tetris Layout "Tetris" Gridded IC Layout
Spice Spice-Class Simulator Interface
Utilities Shared Utilities

Language Bindings

Vlsir defines a data schema, which related projects use in code. Projects using vlsir can be written in any language with protobuf-compiler bindings - which includes essentially every popular programming language. Existing projects have prominently used Python, C++, and Rust. In this repository we have supported bindings for Python and Rust which can be found in bindings and downloaded from their respective package managers:

Language Bindings Package Compiler
Python https://pypi.org/project/vlsir/ Google protoc
Rust https://crates.io/crates/vlsir Prost

Vlsir Tools

The Vlsir repository also serves as home for the Python-language VlsirTools package. VlsirTools is a collection of tools for working with Vlsir's schema, including:

  • Netlisting to industry-standard formats (SPICE, Verilog, etc.)
  • Drivers and result-parsers for Spice-class simulators

Building

The repository includes build scripts for Python, Rust, C++, Javascript and Julia bindings, of which only Rust and Python are actively maintained and tested. These can all be built individually with scripts/build_<your-language-here>.sh or with either of the two joint scripts:

  • build_supported.sh, this builds all supported bindings for use by Vlsir developers
  • build_all_recipes.sh, this builds all bindings and is primarily used for testing

To build, run the script below:

git clone git@github.com:Vlsir/Vlsir
cd Vlsir
scripts/build_<build_flavour>.sh

Projects

Ongoing, co-developed projects which use vlsir:

Project Description Language
Hdl21 Generator-Based Hardware Description Library Python
Layout21 Multi-Layered Layout-Programming Rust
BFG Layout Generation for Open-Source FPGAs C++