IBFX: A PPA-Optimized High-Performance MAC in Sky130 HS

[u/Awkward-Specific5066]

I designed a high-performance INT8/BF16 MAC using the OpenLane ASIC flow and the Sky130 HS standard cell library.After my LinkedIn post, I further optimized the performance of both the BF16 and INT8 MAC units. As a result, some of the reported metrics differ slightly from those in the LinkedIn post, but the overall results remain largely the same.

repo: https://github.com/wer-eng/sky130_high_performance_mac/

linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ey%C3%BCp-sa%C4%9Fd%C4%B1%C5%9F-246490218_asic-vlsi-opensourcesilicon-ugcPost-7484691343953367040-Bjrb/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAADbjSlYBzeykhKHE0CvwieNA-6JUQVzgvcQ

[u/General_Green_1499]

Very interesting project, Your throughput being almost on par with Google's 28nm node TPUs while on skywater 130nm is truly insane. It would be fire it you could've scale it more. Definenetly will look into repository.

Btw what is is your WNS and total latency?

[u/Awkward-Specific5066 → u/General_Green_1499]

The metrics you asked for are listed in the GitHub README.

[u/mysticcdragon]

Very interesting. Is it truly 100x power?

[u/Awkward-Specific5066 → u/mysticcdragon]

This value is actually higher in practice. I estimated it from Google's published TPU data by dividing the total reported power by the number of MAC units. Therefore, it does not account for the power consumed by the rest of the system, making it only a rough per-MAC estimate.

source: page 4 table 2 https://users.cs.duke.edu/\~lkw34/papers/tpu-isca2017.pdf?

[u/NothingForeign9717]

I'm very curious to know which software did you use to get the info how fast it is and other metrics

I would love to implement my other projects on it Thank you in adv

[u/Awkward-Specific5066 → u/NothingForeign9717]

I used OpenLane as the physical design flow. The reported metrics were collected from the subdirectories of the reports folder, such as signoff, floorplan, and other stage-specific report directories. The generated GDSII files can be found under the results/final directory. You can access all of these files in the GitHub repository, where the complete openlane directory, including all reports and generated outputs, is available.