Chip design does not often tend to be thought of as programming, although a complex system-on-chip (SoC) is generally crafted through thousands or millions of lines of code.

For decades chip design has primarily taken place in C-derived, domain-specific hardware description languages, such as Verilog and VHDL. A recent set of hardware description libraries, several based in Python, aim to instead move the chip-design process into modern programming languages.

These developments ride alongside a complementary rise in prominence of the open-source RISC-V instruction set, enabling Python implementations of fully open-source CPUs and SOCs.

This talk will introduce the primary libraries in this space, chips being built with them, and likely future directions for Python's role in silicon design.

Dan Fritchman

Affiliation: HW21

Dan Fritchman is the founder of San Francisco, Ca based HW21, an early-stage company with a mission to Enable Hardware for the 21st Century. Prior to founding HW21, Mr Fritchman spent the period from 2009-19 at Apple Inc, Cupertino, Ca, in a series of roles in silicon and hardware engineering. Mr Fritchman will join the University of California, Berkeley, USA in January 2020 as a candidate for the PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He holds a BS from Duke University, Durham, NC, USA, and an MS from Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, Ca, USA.

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