Hi everyone! We’re the cofounders of SiLogy (
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=u0wAegt79EAInterest 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).
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/
It makes sense to start with Verilator, because it's fast, easy, and open source, but it seems like it'll fall short on a lot of metrics. It seems like the big challenge is going to be making sure your tool can do everything that chip designers actually need to do. I remember spending almost a week bringing up gate-level simulation, which was a huge pain in the ass because our design used an ILM-based hierarchy. Handling things like X-propagation, timing constraints, mixed-language designs, and non-synthesizable models for mixed-signal IP is going to be really tricky, especially because they work differently in every simulator.
Is there any reason why you're not starting by targeting FPGA developers instead of semiconductor developers? It seems like the Verilator flow will do a much better job of fulfilling their needs, which are generally simpler, than fulfilling the needs of an ASIC team. Obviously in the long run, semiconductor developers are the bigger market, but you need far more features to be able to sell to ASIC teams.