{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/chipkit-an-agile-reusable-open-source","title":"CHIPKIT: An agile, reusable open-source framework for rapid test chip development","arxiv_id":"2001.04504","date":"2020-01-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Paul Whatmough","Marco Donato","Glenn Ko","Sae-Kyu Lee","David Brooks","Gu-Yeon Wei"],"abstract":"The current trend for domain-specific architectures (DSAs) has led to renewed interest in research test chips to demonstrate new specialized hardware. Tape-outs also offer huge pedagogical value garnered from real hands-on exposure to the whole system stack. However, successful tape-outs demand hard-earned experience, and the design process is time consuming and fraught with challenges. Therefore, custom chips have remained the preserve of a small number of research groups, typically focused on circuit design research. This paper describes the CHIPKIT framework. We describe a reusable SoC subsystem which provides basic IO, an on-chip programmable host, memory and peripherals. This subsystem can be readily extended with new IP blocks to generate custom test chips. We also present an agile RTL development flow, including a code generation tool calledVGEN. Finally, we outline best practices for full-chip validation across the entire design cycle.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04504v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.04504v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"chipkit-an-agile-reusable-open-source","repo_url":"https://github.com/whatmough/CHIPKIT","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"chipkit-an-agile-reusable-open-source","repo_url":"https://github.com/mrc-donato/CHIPKIT-Tutorial","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}