Thomas Parry - Amateur satellite radio, Open Source vs Industry tools, beautiful analogue layout
Interviews and news from the world of Open Source Silicon, ASICs and Semiconductors.
March 23, 202134m 16sFull
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Show Notes
00:00 Introducing Thomas Parry 00:36 Project is an amateur satellite transceiver 01:02 Thomas wanted a challenging project 01:17 His background 01:50 Working for SystematIC Design in Delft doing analogue chip design 02:29 Design split into 2 repositories, see links below 03:50 Day to day work with Cadence and MentorGraphics industry standard tools 04:25 Pay money to reduce risk - no one to shout at 05:42 Previous interviews with Diego & Lakshmi 06:04 His design process is similar 06:57 Using Klayout for layout 07:15 Using OpenLANE for a small part of the design 08:35 Still uses Magic for extraction of circuit 08:52 Nice structure in his repository 10:24 Overview of the structure of a transceiver 12:20 Difference of the visual appearance of digital vs analogue layout 12:46 Taking a look at the GDS 13:30 Control signals 13:46 Digital section - fractional N divider for the PLL 14:29 9x9 array charge pump output 15:30 VCO - do they always look like bathroom tiles? 15:55 4 inverting amplifiers arranged in a ring 16:35 Created MOSFETs with the generator in Magic, then exported into Klayout 17:08 8x4 blocks of output drivers 17:40 Compensation filter for the PLL is off-chip 18:50 Characterise bandgap in a thermal chamber 19:30 Bandgap references replicated 3 times for different measurement options 20:15 Lovely routing! 21:08 Drawn by hand… 21:14 Ruby & Python scripting for Klayout 21:45 Efabless are working to integrate Klayout more tightly into OpenLANE 22:54 Terminology corner: Corner! 24:04 Typical Typical 25:26 How to get the RF signals in and out of Caravel padring? 26:35 WLCSP 27:20 Currently IO cells are digital 27:44 First 8 pins can be switched to analogue, but not ideal for high frequency 28:16 Power amplification 28:58 What are the next steps? Complete the TX chain 30:20 How to get started with analogue design? 32:02 Python binding for spice: https://pypi.org/project/PySpice/ 33:02 Books by Behzad Razavi are recommended. Design repo: https://github.com/yrrapt/amsat_txrx_ic Shuttle application repo: https://github.com/yrrapt/caravel_amsat_txrx_ic Connect with Thomas here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-parry-60419468/