BaseJump: Building the DNA For Open Source ASIC Systems

Our vision is to create a path that allows researchers to prototype their ideas without worrying about all of the intricacies of I/O, packaging, PC board design and FPGA coding. Our goal is to shave 10-15 people-years off of a typical ASIC prototype development process, and at the same time enable artifacts that are of superior performance to what most research groups would have the resources to do. We have implemented a complete system that extends from the pad ring of the chip all the way out. You just need to design your verilog to connect to our simple interface, and then make use of the pre-built components that we have developed and tested. Push it through IC Compiler, PrimeTime and Calibre to a tapeout. The rest of the way has already been thought out. Current Users: University of Washington University of Utah University of Toronto Princeton University University of Illinois Urbana Champagne Massachusetts Institute of Technology University of California, San Diego U of Cambridge Cornell U. Michigan Prof. Michael Taylor Bespoke Silicon Group University of Washington CSE and EE

BaseJump Projects

BaseJump STL: A standard library for SystemVerilog

BaseJump ASIC Socket

The BaseJump ASIC Socket interface provides a standardized interface for new ASIC accelerators to use, allowing fast time to market and low NRE. You match up your RTL with our Network-On-Chip interface, and then you can use our package, board, and PHY/MAC layer, provided in portable SystemVerilog for both FPGA and ASIC, to make a complete system!

You can use our RTL, socket interface, our pad ring, our package, and our board all independently of each other. But you will minimize design time and cost if you use them all together!

Our socket interface, pad ring, package and board are all jointly optimized for signal integrity.

See detailed information on:

BaseJump Socket 352
BaseJump Socket 355

BaseJump ASIC MotherBoards

BaseJump LVCMOS Link (ASIC-to-ASIC and FPGA-to-FPGA Bridge)

The BaseJump FPGA Bridge is designed to work with BaseJump Socket.
It is synthesizeable SystemVerilog that implements a high-speed DDR source synchronous communication channel (PHY, link and MAC layer.)

It is designed to be instantiated into an ASIC, and allows high speed communication through the BaseJump BGA package to another FPGA. We also support, for Double and Real Trouble, an additional hop that goes from a "gateway" FPGA over FMC to an ML-605 or Zedboard which hosts the DRAM memory system and/or and PCI-E host to a PC. The idea is that if you reuse the BaseJump Socket Interface, you can attached your RTL verilog to a working I/O system with very little effort.

See BaseJump STL bsg_link.

Note we have Spartan-6 specific code for the bridge that uses the FPGA SerDes. Send us an email and we will post it.

BaseJump BSG PCI Express Implementation

This module allows an Virtex-6 ML-605 board to communicate with Linux 2.6 via the PCI Express connector. The abstraction is a number of flow-controlled FIFOs that are mapped into user space Linux. Your user code reads and writes to the FIFOs via memory-mapped I/O.

UCSD has a PC<-->FPGA board infrastructure called RIFFA. It has a wider variety of supported boards, but focuses on DMA from DRAM. We would guess that the latency is higher but that the throughput is better.

The BaseJump RV-IOV (RISC-V Virtualization)

Further Steps