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Nov 24 2022

Pre-silicon testing of SkyWater MPW designs using co-simulation with Renode and Verilator

Pre-silicon testing of SkyWater MPW designs using co-simulation with Renode and Verilator

As part of the effort to introduce open source tools and building blocks to ASIC development, together with other CHIPS Alliance members, Antmicro has been supporting the Multi-Project-Wafer (MPW) shuttle program, using the first open source 130nm PDK run by efabless, Google and SkyWater Technology Foundry. Making open tooling for pre-silicon testing and verification broadly available has significant potential for mitigating difficulties in the ASIC design of post-Moore’s Law age. In yet another push towards this direction, Antmicro has introduced an MPW design tester template for Renode, our open source simulation framework, targeted at open MPW shuttle submission projects. Read more

Nov 14 2022

Bluetooth Mesh networking pathfinding algorithm development using Renode

Bluetooth Mesh networking pathfinding algorithm development using Renode

Antmicro’s open source Renode simulation framework offers support for the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol and multi-node simulation capabilities, which makes it a great environment for development, debugging and testing of local area radio networks, such as IoT consumer devices, smart home applications or multi-sensor telemetry systems. On top of device-level debugging through virtual machine code execution, Renode features probabilistic packets loss simulation, global network state analysis and, perhaps most notably in this case, automated testing of various network configurations with the Robot Framework. Read more

Oct 26 2022

Renode now supports .NET 6

Renode now supports .NET 6

The latest version of Antmicro’s open source simulation framework, Renode 1.13 was released some months ago, bringing a variety of improvements all across the board. Since then, there have been even more updates in the form of 1.13.1 and 1.13.2, reflecting the rapid development of the framework. One of the most significant changes for the long term development of Renode, but perhaps less prominently discussed so far while the work was underway, is introducing support for the .NET 6 runtime, alongside the original Mono framework that Renode was built around. Read more

Oct 4 2022

Demystifying software - different methods of execution tracing with Renode

Demystifying software - different methods of execution tracing with Renode

Tracing software execution on real hardware can be challenging, as to access the internal state of the components and the software itself you often need to attach specialized debugging hardware or instrument the source code. Since additional hardware can throw off the timing of events and desynchronize the whole system, and instrumented software may not always be able to use the highest level of compiler optimization, the gathered information may not be the same as for the normal binary. Read more