SIGARCH RTL Project Template

This is SIGARCH’s RTL project template. In essence, this provides a skeleton environment inside which you can write your code, then simulate and synthesize it using UIUC’s Synopsys licenses, available to you via EWS.

Quickstart with EWS (UIUC students/employees)

unix> refers to any UNIX-y prompt. These instructions should work on Linux, macOS, and WSL.

Setup SSH Key Pair

First, make sure you can SSH into EWS.

unix> ssh netid@linux.ews.illinois.edu

This will ask for the password associated with your NetID, then log you into a remote EWS machine. Log out of EWS. Let’s set it up so that you don’t need to enter your password every time:

unix> ssh-keygen -t rsa
unix> ssh-copy-id netid@linux.ews.illinois.edu

If your system doesn’t have ssh-copy-id, you can instead do:

# If ssh-copy-id didn't work.
unix> cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh netid@linux.ews.illinois.edu "mkdir -p ~/.ssh && cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"

Now, try:

unix> ssh netid@linux.ews.illinois.edu

You should get logged in without needing to enter your password. Now, logout with Ctrl-D. The rest of these commands should all be run on your local machine.

Clone this repository

unix> git clone https://github.com/uiuc-sigarch/sigarch-rtl-project-template
unix> cd sigarch-rtl-project-template

Copy over `setup_synopsys_toolchain.sh`

This repository provides a file that needs to reside in your EWS home folder. Copy it over with:

unix> scp setup_synopsys_toolchain.sh netid@linux.ews.illinois.edu:/home/netid

You may need to make the script executable:

unix> ssh netid@linux.ews.illinois.edu "chmod +x ~/setup_synopsys_toolchain.sh"

Put your NetID into `run_on_ews.sh`

Open run_on_ews.sh in your favorite editor, and change netid on line 11 to your NetID.

Run a sim

Running a sim is now easy:

unix> ./run_on_ews.sh # rsync's the source, runs the sim, rsync's the artifacts

The artifacts (compile log, simulation log, VCD waveform) are put in ews_run_artifacts. See if you can find a UVM info message saying “Hello world”. Feel free to edit run_on_ews.sh to get more of the artifacts locally.

View the waveform

To view the waveform, you can use GTKWave:

unix> gtkwave ews_run_artifacts/dump.vcd &

You can alternately add the -fsdb option to VCS (using the Makefile), then view the FSDB using Verdi, but VNC connections are slow especially if you aren’t in Urbana-Champaign (as is the case for me when I’m writing this).

Quickstart for advanced users

See the Makefile to get an idea of the feature set supported:

Simulation using Synopsys VCS, with support for UVM, for which you’ll need to have $UVM_HOME on your $PATH.
Synthesis is done using the generic FreePDK45 using Synopsys DC, which you’ll need to have on your $PATH as $STD_CELL_LIB.

Run with “make run“. The synthesis target is “make synth“.

pratyaygopal/sigarch-rtl-project-template