3. Quickstart guide
After following the Installation instructions, you can either run remotely in the cloud, or run locally on your machine. The run instructions below will use asic_demo, a simple design run in an ASIC flow, using the skywater130 PDK (set up from Installation).
3.1. Remote Run
SiliconCompiler supports running jobs in the cloud on either private or public servers. We are currently running a public beta server which anybody can use. To see the details of how remote processing works, see here.
3.1.1. Public Cloud Access
By default, SiliconCompiler will send remote jobs to our public beta servers, after printing a brief reminder that the job is being uploaded to a public server. You can run a quick self-test to verify that SiliconCompiler was installed successfully:
sc -target asic_demo -remote
The job should only take a few minutes to run if the servers aren’t too busy. Skip to remote run results to see the expected output.
You do not need to configure anything to use the remote flag with these public servers, but you can use the sc-configure command to specify where SiliconCompiler should send remote jobs. For more information, see the Configuring a Different Remote Server section.
3.1.2. Remote Run Results
Your run will first show the the SiliconCompiler banner/info, followed by design INFO messages.
As run goes through each step of the flow, a message will be printed to the screen every 30 seconds.
Then, at the end of the run, a summary table will be printed similar to the one show below:
All design outputs are located in build/<design>/<jobname>. When running remote, you will not get all the tool-specific output that you would with a local run, but you will be able to find a screenshot of the demo design heartbeat.png and a summary report in report.html:
3.2. Local Run
If you wish to run locally, you will need to install some external tool dependencies to start. Take a look at External Tools for a list of tools which you may want to have.
Note
The minimum set of tools required for an ASIC flow are: Surelog, Yosys, OpenROAD, and KLayout. Links to individual tool installation instructions and platform limitations can be found in the Tools directory.
Once you have these tools installed, try compiling a simple design:
(venv) cd $SCPATH/../examples/heartbeat
(venv) sc -target asic_demo
Your run will first show the the SiliconCompiler banner/info, followed by design INFO messages.
Then, at the end of the run, a summary table will be printed similar to the one show below:
By default, only the summary of each step is printed, in order to not clutter up the screen with tool-specific output. If you wish to see the output from each tool, you can find the log files associated with each tool in: build/<design>/<jobname>/<step>/<index>/<step>.log
If you wish to see all the tool-specific information printed onto the screen, you can turn the quiet option off.
3.2.1. View Design
For viewing IC layout files (DEF, GDSII) we recommend installing the open source multi-platform Klayout viewer (available for Windows, Linux, and macOS). Installation instructions for Klayout can be found in the tools directory.
If you have Klayout installed, at the end of your run, a window should have popped up with your completed design.
If you have closed that window and want to reference it again, you can view the output from the asicflow by by calling sc-show directly from the command line as shown below:
(venv) sc-show -design heartbeat
3.3. What Next?
Now that you’ve quickly run a simple example, you can proceed to a larger example like Building Your Own SoC, or you can dive deeper into the SiliconCompiler build flow you ran from this quickstart (asic_demo) by looking through how the flow is constructed with Data model, Programming model, and Execution model.