Chip Gallery Splash 2

Designers:

Stevo Bailey, John Wright, Nandish Mehta, Rachel Hochman, Vladimir Milovanovic

Tapeout:

ST 28nm FDSOI, December 2015

Description:

Splash is a low power, broad bandwidth, digital spectrometer for atmospheric composition measurements. The first design effort at UC Berkeley developed a combined 1.5 GHz bandwidth ADC frontend and a DSP backend, called SPLASH. The new spectrometer will feature a new high-bandwidth ADC designed by Rachel Hochman. Two copies of the ADC will digitize the I and Q bands separately, operating at a combined bandwith of 20 GHz. The SPLASH DSP backend was extended to accommodate the higher bandwidth and increased number of channels. This backend features a polyphase FIR filter, FFT, and frequency calibration scheme. The DSP backend was written Chisel, a Berkeley hardware construction language. Using Chisel allowed me to create a flexible DSP generator which supports any amount of breadth (parallelism), depth (channels), and performance (pipelining). It also handles a variety of bitwidth specifications, and it allows the choice of single-ported or dual-ported memories.

Related publications:

This work has been published places.