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Launch HN: SiLogy (YC W24) – Chip design and verification in the cloud
Hi everyone! We’re the cofounders of SiLogy (https://silogy.io/ https://silogy.io/). We’re building chip design and verification tools to speed up the semiconductor development cycle. Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0wAegt79EA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0wAegt79EA
Interest in designing new chips is growing, thanks to demand from AI and the predicted decline of Moore’s Law. All these chips need to be tested in simulation. Since the number of possible states grows exponentially with chip complexity, the need for verification is exploding. Chip developers already spend 70% of their time on testing. (See this video on the “verification gap”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtaaOdGuMCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtaaOdGuMCc).
Tooling hasn’t kept up. The state of the art in collaborative debugging is to walk to a coworker’s desk and point to an error in a log file or waveform file. Each chip company rolls out its own tooling and infra to deal with this—this was Kay’s (one of our cofounders) entire job at his last gig. But they want to work on chips, not devtools! The solutions they come up with are often inadequate and frustrating. That’s why we started SiLogy.
SiLogy is a web app to manage the entire digital verification workflow. (“Digital verification” means testing the logic of the design and includes everything before the physical design of the chip. It’s the most time-consuming stage in verification.)
We combine three capabilities:
Test orchestration and running: The heart of our product is a CI tool that runs Verilator, a popular open-source simulator, in a Docker container. When you push to your repo or manually trigger a job in the UI, we install your dependencies and compile your binaries into a Docker image, and run your tests. You can also rerun a single test with custom arguments using the UI.
Test results and statistics: We display logs from each test in the web app. We’re working on displaying waveform files in the app, too. We also keep track of passing and failing tests within each test suite, and we’re working on slick visualizations of test trends, to keep managers happy. :)
Collaboration: soon you’ll be able to send a link to and leave a comment on a specific location within a log or waveform file, just like in Google Docs.
Unlike generic CI tools, we focus on tight integration with verification workflows. When an assertion fails, we show you the source code where it happened. We’re hard at work on waveform viewing – soon you’ll be able to generate waves from a failing test, with the click of a button.
Our roadmap includes support for the major commercial simulators: VCS, Xcelium, and Questa. We’re also working on a test gen framework based on Buck2 to statically declare tests for your post-commit runs, or programmatically generate thousands of tests for nightly regressions.
We plan to sell seats, with discounts for individuals, startups, and research labs (we’re working on pricing). For now, we’re opening up guest registration so HN can play with what we hope is the future of design verification. We owe so much of what we know to this community and we’d be so grateful for any feedback. <3
You can sign up here, just press "Use guest email address" if you don't want to give up your email: https://dash.silogy.io/signup/ https://dash.silogy.io/signup/
- karthityrion 3y agoI might be missing something but how does the product reduce verification time? Isn't it just Verilator running on a cloud server? How does it help with debugging?
- pkkim 3y agoHey, good question, thanks. We speed up developers in two ways: For debugging individual tests, we have a web based log viewer and web based waveform viewer, so you can share test results or look at waves via a URL, instead of opening VNC. More holistically, we're building a chip focused workflow that will make tests first class -- infrastructure to track tests, and by extension measure design health, will be in one place, instead of implemented with a bunch of handrolled, bespoke tooling.
- karthityrion 3y agoThank you! So will it be a web-based wave viewer and debugger?
- pkkim 3y agoThose will certainly be a big part of it. But we’ll also be adding a lot more dev friendly tooling around it as well.
- qzcx 3y agoAs someone who's also done a lot of DV and DV tools, I love to see it. This gap was something I took away from attending DVCon last year and seeing all the papers from folks reinventing in the same verif tools. Feeling inspired after DVCon, I was sick of how annoying our test infrastructure was to interact with so I built a vscode extension as a front end to the existing mature infrastructure. Handles running tests, regressions, opening logs of all kinds, launching vendor tools, jumping to definitions, hover over documentation on all our custom config files, even breakpoints that export to verdi. I've got about 30 people using it now which is pretty neat. My main learnings are 1) boy it would be tough to make this generic enough to my existing infra without making it lose all the benefits 2) Switching away from my editor is a huge context loss, having tools directly inside my editor keeps everything moving faster.The thought of adding yet another important web page to my browser isn't pleasant. I specifically added features to my extension so I could avoid going to our internal regression results webpage.