How to develop microelectronics in Russia and defeat iPhone

    The basis of modern gadgets is the technology of creating “systems on a chip” (SoC, in English System on Chip, SoC). How to teach Russian students this black magic of the 21st century? This was discussed at the seminars organized by the British company Imagination Technologies, one of the developers of the internals of the Apple iPhone , in the spring in the suburbs of Los Angeles . In a week, the same seminars will be held in Russia - for their organization, Imagination cooperated with leading Russian universities - Moscow State University, MEPhI, MIET and ITMO , as well as with the famous manufacturer of microcontrollers, Arizona-based companies Microchip Technology. In addition to the week of seminars on October 26-30, seminars in a similar format will be held at Samara Aerospace (November 5) and at MIPT (November 9).




    Sausage and

    iPhone fetish The statement that iPhones are not made in Russia has become the same cultural cliche of our time as 40 years ago - stories about 50 varieties of Western sausage that were not in Soviet grocery stores. Not so long ago, the appeared Russian Yotaphone phones do not remove all the arguments of critics, because these phones are built on microcircuits that were designed and manufactured in other countries.

    This is not to say that on the Russian front, chips for their iPhones and other gadgets are completely hopeless. In May, a group of Russian companies ELVIS and the British company Imagination Technologies issued a joint press release, which described plans for creating joint circuits (systems on a chip), which will contain both blocks developed in London and California, and blocks developed in Zelenograd, Moscow Region. At the same time, ELVIS is a well-known developer of chips for space, Imagination is Apple’s partner in the development of chips in the Apple iPhone, and the press release mentions modern silicon technologies with a base transistor size of 28nm-10nm.

    Another Russian company, Baikal Electronics, also in May back announced the release of the Russian high-performance microprocessorfor embedded Baikal T1 systems. These are already real microcircuits that Baikal began to distribute for testing to engineers of potential customers, including foreign ones. Baikal T1 also uses Imagination units and is manufactured in Taiwan, but the system on a chip was designed in Russia, so the processor may be called Russian.




    Does this mean that the era of Russian microcircuits of the same class as in Apple products is about to come? Not really. There are only a few development groups such as ELVIS and Baikal Electronics. Now, if there were several dozen of them, and ELVIS-Imagination transactions — several hundred — then it would be possible to say that Russia would become not the next USA or China in electronics, but at least the next electronic Israel or South Korea. The main constraint on growth is the lack of qualified personnel. Young engineers for ELVIS and similar companies are taught in only a few Russian universities. How to bring education in a large number of Russian technical universities to the level of the best universities in the USA, Western Europe and developed countries of Asia?

    DIY microprocessor

    The first step is to update the tutorials. Recently, a new junior textbook, Digital Circuitry and Computer Architecture, created by professors David and Sarah Harris, was published in Russian. This textbook is distributed free of charge in electronic form as part of the educational programs of Imagination Technologies, which bought the rights to a Russian publication from Elsevier and organized its translation by a large group of professors from Russian and Ukrainian universities, workers from Russian electronic companies, as well as Russian engineers from European and American companies - Imagination , AMD, Apple and others. RUSNANO Fund for Infrastructure and Educational Programs also participated in the transfer .





    A distinctive feature of the new textbook - introduces the student to the design of microcircuits and programming at the same time, as it should be done in the era of complex systems on a chip, and ties everything to practice. Students build their own simple microprocessor and compare it with a real industrial Microchip PIC32 microcontroller. But how is it possible - for a student to make a chip? After all, the initial payment for the production of a commercial batch of microchips in a factory such as the Taiwanese TSMC (footnote: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) usually exceeds one million dollars.






    The answer is a technology called FPGA (short for field programmable gate array, “user-programmable gate arrays”). These are special microcircuits, which are matrixes of cells, logical functions and connections between which can be changed many times after manufacturing. They are much more expensive and slower than conventional specialized chips, but for them there is no “down payment” for production. There are student boards with FPGAs that cost less than $ 100 on the market now, so students and universities no longer need to lay out large amounts of money to experiment. Moreover, it can unlimitedly change the electronic circuit formed in FPGA, simply changing its configuration memory via a cable connected to a computer. In terms of flexibility, this is similar to programming,




    Student vs. Samsung

    Well, using a Harris textbook and an FPGA-based board, students can design simple microprocessors and peripherals. But commercial systems on a chip use microprocessor units developed in the industry, licenses for which cost hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars. How can students access and experiment with such blocks without forcing universities to buy commercial licenses? The response was Imagination's MIPSfpga initiative , announced this spring, which immediately received great feedback from Stanford University President John Hennessy, professors from Imperial College London, and Keio, Japan's oldest university.

    MIPSfpga is a free university version of the MIPS microAptiv UP microprocessor core. This MIPS core is used in the new Samsung ARTIK 1 platform, which Samsung announced at the last IOT World conference in San Francisco. With the introduction of MIPSfpga in universities, students can not only use ready-made chips like ARTIK 1, but also get access to the source codes (in the Verilog hardware description language) of the same processor core, which is used by Samsung engineers themselves in their product . Moreover, after experimenting with MIPSfpga, students can theoretically raise money from venture capitalists and make a commercial microcircuit that can compete directly against Samsung itself.

    www.artik.io/hardware/artik-1




    The miniature (12 by 12 millimeters) built-in computer Samsung ARTIK 1 contains microchips with two processor cores - MIPS microAptiv UP and UC, an antenna and a motion sensor. Such a device can be used for “smart things” exchanging information with the Internet (this is how the name of the conference is decrypted - The Internet of Things, “Internet of things”).


    MIPSfpga uses a standard methodology for the description and development of digital electronics over the past 25 years called Register Transfer Level (RTL, register transfer level). According to this methodology, the electronic circuit is described in the special language Verilog, after which the logic synthesis program turns the description into a mathematical graph of wires and logic elements; another program (static timing analysis) tells the developer whether the developed scheme fits into the speed budget, and the third program (place-and-route) lays out the synthesized structure along the microcircuit platform.


    Cast in silicon

    FPGA is good, but can a student see a factory-made microchip of their own design? According to David Harris, “MOSIS is available for such needs in the USA, and Europractice is available in Europe. MOSIS forms the so-called Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) - an order form for small-scale production, when several different integrated circuits developed by teams from different organizations are manufactured on a semiconductor wafer. MOSIS has a schedule when universities can send them “blueprints” (GDSII files) and they can send them to factories. Such production is free for educational needs and provides very attractive prices for research needs. This allows both students and researchers to receive the results of their work in the form of ready-made microcircuits. ”




    Theoretically, the Russian government could do the same service for Zelenograd factories Mikron and Angstrom. These factories are not as advanced as the Taiwanese TSMC — they use used equipment purchased from ST, AMD, and IBM, capable of producing only 90 nanometer chips. But this does not mean that advanced products cannot be manufactured in these factories. For example, the popular Franco-Italian STM32 microcontrollers based on the British ARM Cortex M4 processor are made on this technology.

    Moreover, according to David Harris, “Nothing advanced is needed for training purposes. A transistor is always a 10 micron transistor (10 microns or 10,000 nanometers is the technology on which the first ever Intel 4004 microprocessor was made in 1971), which is 90 nanometers, or 10 nanometers. ” The most modern factory costs 5-6 billion dollars, the factory in Zelenograd - 600 million, but if you set out to show students how to produce a transistor, then the university needs to buy several million extra equipment from some ancient factory, although after that you have to pay for chemicals, ventilation and safety equipment. ”

    On the other hand, according to David Harris, “I don’t think that a good designer needs direct work experience. Although such an experience is, of course, a plus. ”

    Tips for Russia

    Several participants in the Los Angeles MIPSfpga seminar answered questions about what can be done in Russia.
    Jason Wong, educational program manager at Xilinx, which is the FPGA market leader, believes that the education development program should be tailored to the culture of each country: “we don’t know what will work in Russia, but we can say that it worked in other countries. "

    His colleague at Xilinx, Dr. Parimal Patel, explained: “In India, as in Russia, students are well educated in mathematics and physics. The government has selected several leading universities that have prepared courses for the rest in a few years. After 5-6 years, the system began to produce first results. ”

    Jason Wong added “Similar measures have been taken in China. At the same time, the government required reporting from universities in the form of five-year plans. Maybe Russia should adopt five-year plans. They were invented in Russia? (Laughs) Maybe. ”

    Professor Daniel Chaver of the largest Complutense University of Madrid does not see the need for special programs; from his point of view, expanding the teaching of electronics is purely a matter of money - from the government or the income from paid education at universities. In the already developed ecosystem of Western Europe, the prioritization of certain areas occurs naturally, according to the laws of the market of available works, abilities and desires of students.

    Professor Sarah Harris from the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, one of the developers of MIPSfpga and co-author of the electronics textbook, believes that the state should give professors the opportunity to make training programs themselves, but at the same time the programs should be tied to practice - students should build tangible things.

    Harvey Mudd College Professor David Harris, co-author of the tutorial and MIPSfpga, formerly one of the developers of Intel Pentium and other chips, concluded: “Teachers who strive for excellence with a relatively small budget can prepare young people who will become future technology leaders” .




    - If you liked my text, and at the same time you live in Moscow, you can join virtualization in just a few days. The avant-garde virtualization group (including me) meets at 12 noon on Sunday October 25, the Smolenskaya metro exit of the blue metro line. After that, we go to dinner at 3 p.m. in Jean-Jacques on Nikitsky Boulevard to reposition Jean-Jacques from the meeting place of creative humanitarians to the meeting place of hard readers and readers of my posts on the topics of the microelectronic industry.

    Here are pictures from previous virtualizations:






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    What part of the victory over iPhone do you participate / want to participate in?

    • 11.4% As a research physicist with applications for microelectronic technologies 21
    • 5.4% As a developer for ASIC libraries 10
    • 7.6% As an author of tools for design automation 14
    • 8.6% As a developer of analog circuits 16
    • 16.3% As a developer of digital circuits at the register transfer level (RTL) 30
    • 17.9% As a system designer on a chip 33
    • 19% As a hardware developer at the electronic system level 35
    • 41.8% As an embedded programmer 77
    • 39.6% I do not want to develop anything, I only want to buy iPhones in the store 73

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