• AtiVEGA at IndiaFOSS 2024

    Shree Kumar • 09/12/2024 at 05:10 • 0 comments

    I had a good time talking about and doing a demo of AtiVEGA at IndiaFOSS 2024.  My talk was scheduled for the second day of the conference. That talk was titled "Open source in and for Indian Chips". In the talk, Igave an overview, explained the context behind AtiVEGA and gave a short 150MHz overclocking demo. The entire conference was live-streamed,. When you hit the play button in the video below, it will start with my talk:


    IndiaFOSS is India's premier volunteer run open source conference, run by the FOSS United community. This time, there was a very healthy hardware component in the conference talks, and in the booths as well.

    The talks slides are here, if you need a quick look. The response to the talk frankly beat my expectations!  It is true that my expectations were low, battle scarred veteran that I am. Hardware takes time.  And we have a long way to go in India w.r.t having a large active open hardware development community. All that said, I can sense an undercurrent of adoption. I found a few possible adopters for the board during the conference, and that was heartening! A good start.

    So, what next for the project ? The am looking to evolve AtiVEGA into a learner's kit for RISC-V. It's unique clock feature makes it suitable for single stepping and even half stepping the clock. Great for learning and teaching what happens in and out of chips.

    I am relaxing this week and the next, and will be travelling. More action after the festive weekend of Onam!

  • First power on done!

    Shree Kumar • 09/01/2024 at 09:26 • 0 comments

    I have been developing this concept and the board for a while. Some background behind this board and some reasons why I am developing it are covered in this talk that I gave at ChennaiFOSS 2024:

    The entire project is available on github. I have been making slow progress over this for a few months now.  Three weeks ago, I finalized the PCB and got a few boards made.

    Boards came in quickly.  I hand assembled one - the LQFP 128 package turned out to be quite a test for my soldering skills ! This is how the board looks

     I was woefully out of practice. Trying to solder the finest component on the board first was hubris at best. I did damage one pad - a GPIO linking the THEJAS32 to the Pico (pin 6), but luckily the rest were fine. - here is a closeup with the gory details:

    But the great news is - the board WORKS ! Bring-up was fun, and I learnt a lot too... longer long story in the next post.

    So, what works ? The board boots. Code can be uploaded to THEJAS32 over UART.  I can toggle a GPIO. I can run this microcontroller at 100 MHz - it's rated speed.  And I have slowed it down to... hold your breath... 500 kHz  ! Haven't gone lower than that at the moment - as it would take forever to boot, but I know I can go as slow as I need to.  This is the only microcontroller I have seen where one can directly control the clock externally - much the same way as you would do in a verilog simulation. Bizarre, and interesting ?

    Source code for a simple power on is on github too - checkout sw/bringup/poweron/poweron.c .