Building the World's First Open Source Ethernet Switch ASIC
Designing an Ethernet Switch ASIC
I am designing the world's first open source Ethernet switch ASIC, currently taped out on the Tiny Tapeout gf26b shuttle chip. Facing strict pin and area constraints, I opted for a cut-through design using external PHY chips to achieve 100Mbps Ethernet. This project aims to fill the gap in open source networking hardware, moving beyond proprietary black boxes to create transparent, community-driven silicon.
Networking equipment is far less sexy than CPUs and has thus received much less attention from the open source community.
- roadbuster
Great project & article. Beyond the use of verilog, I couldn't find a description of the EDA stack. What tooling is used for the physical stages of design: place & route, LVS, DRC, and electrical circuit simulation (SPICE)?
- inigyou
Nice! I've been following waferspace and tiny tapeout loosely but I'm sadly not in a position to be able to work on something right now.
I'm surprised you managed to fit something like this in a TT grid square.
- noncoml
“ Cut-through vs Store-and-Forward”
I had a Google interview collapse because the last interviewer was a Principle Engineer who just couldn’t accept that a switch will ever forward a frame before reading in full and checking the FCS.
I was too much of an idiot to go along with it and instead ended up having an argument with him.