Hardware Design Environment

In digital/mixed signal design there are a lot of different software packages that may be needed. Setting up your environment for these is an important step to get started with your designs. These can be installed on a single machine for your own use, however it can be advantageous to do these on a server that you share with your research group.

Hardware Requirements

This is difficult to exactly pin point, as it will depend on how many users you have and the complexity of your designs

• CPU: 64-bit preferable multi-core
• RAM: 8 GB minimum, 32 GB or more preferred
• Disk-space: 500 GB - 1 TB

GPU is usually not massively important as almost all the workload is done in CPU. Disk space usage is quite intensive, the PDKs take up quite a lot, and simulation and backend files are usually also fairly large.

Our SoCLabs server has the following

• CPU: 16 core intel Xeon
• RAM: 256 GB

We have about 5-6 users

Operating System

Most EDA tools are designed to run on RHEL. At SoCLabs we have RHEL 8 running on our server. Whilst officially not supported, most of these tools do also run on CentOS (as it is similar to RHEL)

Basic Software

Fundamental software you are likely to need:

• Python
• Perl

EDA Tools

The following tools are available from europractice:

Behavioural Simulation tools

• Mentor Graphics: QuestaSim
• Synopsys: VCS
• Cadence: Xcelium

Digital Backend Tools

• Mentor Graphics: Calibre
• Synopsys: Design Compiler, ICC2, Fusion Compiler
• Cadence: Genus, Innovus, RTL-to-GDSII

Analog Design

• Synopsys: Custom Compiler
• Cadence: Virtuoso

FPGA

• Xilinx Vivado