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What is Genesis2?

Genesis2 is a chip generator originally developed at Stanford University.

What is a chip generator?

In a nutshell...
The Chip Generator (CG) is a design system for automatically producing custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).
Tell me more...
Because of technology scaling, power dissipation is today’s major performance limiter. Moreover, the traditional way to achieve power efficiency, application-specific designs, is prohibitively expensive. These power and cost issues necessitate rethinking digital design. To reduce design costs, we need to stop building chip instances, and start making chip generators instead. Domain-specific chip generators are templates that codify designer knowledge and design trade-offs to create different application-optimized chips.
I really want to understand...
Please read "Rethinking Digital Design: Why Design Must Change," O. Shacham, O. Azizi, M. Wachs, W. Qadeer, Z. Asgar, K. Kelley, J.P. Stevenson, A. Solomatnikov, A. Firoozshahian, B.C. Lee, S. Richardson, M. Horowitz IEEE Micro, Nov/Dec 2010. (IEEE Explore)

Download and Install Genesis2

Github

To install in e.g. /home/mydir/Genesis2:

  setenv GENESIS_HOME $destdir/Genesis2Tools
  set path=(. $GENESIS_HOME/bin $GENESIS_HOME/gui/bin $path)
  setenv PERL5LIB $GENESIS_HOME/PerlLibs/ExtrasForOldPerlDistributions

If you get an error like this when you try to run Genesis:

  Compress::Raw::Zlib object version 2.060 does not match bootstrap parameter...

You might need to do this:

  /bin/rm -rf $destdir/Genesis2Tools/PerlLibs/ExtrasForOldPerlDistributions/Compress

Also see Genesis2 installation instructions

Tarball

Download the tar ball, then follow the installation instructions.

Creating Chip Generators Using Genesis2

Use Genesis2 to create your own chip generator (see below).
Use the Genesis2 GUI to generate chips (see below).

Genesis2

The Genesis2 GUI

The GUI is a convenient graphical user interface with which to generate chips from Genesis2-based chip generators. It comes free with the Genesis2 distribution.

Interfacing with Genesis2

Be Part of the Genesis2 User Community!

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