Volare is a version manager (and builder) for builds of Google open-source PDKs using open_pdks.
Get Homebrew then:
brew install python3
Debian 10+ or Ubuntu 18.04+ is required.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip xz-utils
RHEL 7+ or compatible operating system required.
sudo yum install -y python3 python3-pip
##Installation and Upgrades To install (or upgrade)
python3 -m pip install --upgrade --no-cache-dir volare
To verify it works
volare --version
##Troubleshooting
With a typical Python 3.6 or higher installation with PIP, installing volare is as simple as a pip install. Despite that, there are some peculiarities with PIP itself: For example, you may see a warning among these lines:
WARNING: The script volare is installed in '/home/test/.local/bin' which is not on PATH.
Consider adding this directory to PATH or, if you prefer to suppress this warning, use --no-warn-script-location.
The solution is as simple as adding something like this to your shell profile:
export PATH="/home/test/.local/bin:$PATH"
Do note that the path (/home/test/.local/bin in this example) varies depending on your operating system and version of Python you install, and whether you use sudo (absolutely not recommended) or not, so ensure that you actually read the warning and add the correct path.
In its current inception, volare supports builds of sky130 and gf180mcu PDKs using Open_PDKs, including the following libraries:
|sky130|gf180mcu| |: --- |: ---| |sky130_fd_io|gf180mcu_fd_io| |sky130_fd_pr|gf180mcu_fd_pr| |sky130_fd_sc_hd|gf180mcu_fd_sc_mcu7t5v0| |sky130_fd_sc_hvl|gf180mcu_fd_sc_mcu9t5v0| |sky130 sram modules|gf180mcu_fd_ip_sram|
All builds are identified by their open_pdks commit hash.
Volare requires a so-called PDK Root. This PDK root can be anywhere on your computer, but by default it's the folder ~/.volare in your home directory. If you have the variable PDK_ROOT set, volare will use that instead. You can also manually override both values by supplying the --pdk-root commandline argument.
To list all available pre-built PDKs hosted in this repository, you can just invoke volare ls-remote --pdk <PDK>. If you omit the --pdk argument, sky130 will be used as a default.
$ volare ls-remote --pdk sky130 Pre-built sky130 PDK versions ├── 44a43c23c81b45b8e774ae7a84899a5a778b6b0b (2022.08.16) (enabled) ├── e8294524e5f67c533c5d0c3afa0bcc5b2a5fa066 (2022.07.29) (installed) ├── 41c0908b47130d5675ff8484255b43f66463a7d6 (2022.04.14) (installed) ├── 660c6bdc8715dc7b3db95a1ce85392bbf2a2b195 (2022.04.08) ├── 5890e791e37699239abedfd2a67e55162e25cd94 (2022.04.06) ├── 8fe7f760ece2bb49b1c310e60243f0558977dae5 (2022.04.06) └── 7519dfb04400f224f140749cda44ee7de6f5e095 (2022.02.10)
$ volare ls-remote --pdk gf180mcu Pre-built gf180mcu PDK versions └── 120b0bd69c745825a0b8b76f364043a1cd08bb6a (2022.09.22)
It includes a commit hash, which is the open_pdks version used to build this particular PDK, the date that this commit was created, and whether you already installed this PDK and/or if it is the currently enabled PDK.
Typing volare ls --pdk <pdk> in the terminal shows you your PDK Root and the PDKs you currently have installed. Again, if you omit the --pdk argument, sky130 will be used as a default.
$ volare ls --pdk sky130 /home/test/volare/sky130/versions ├── 44a43c23c81b45b8e774ae7a84899a5a778b6b0b (2022.08.16) (enabled) ├── e8294524e5f67c533c5d0c3afa0bcc5b2a5fa066 (2022.07.29) └── 41c0908b47130d5675ff8484255b43f66463a7d6 (2022.04.14)
(If you are not connected to the Internet, the release date of the commit will not be included.)
You can enable a particular sky130 PDK by invoking volare enable --pdk <pdk> <open_pdks commit hash>. This will automatically download that particular version of the PDK, if found, and set it as your currently used PDK.
For example, to activate a build of sky130 using open_pdks 7519dfb04400f224f140749cda44ee7de6f5e095, you invoke volare enable --pdk sky130 7519dfb04400f224f140749cda44ee7de6f5e095, as shown below:
$ volare enable --pdk sky130 7519dfb04400f224f140749cda44ee7de6f5e095 Downloading pre-built tarball for 7519dfb04400f224f140749cda44ee7de6f5e095… ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100% 0:00:00 Unpacking… ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100% 0:00:00 PDK version 7519dfb04400f224f140749cda44ee7de6f5e095 enabled.
What's more: if you're using a repository with a tool_metadata.yml file, such as OpenLane or DFFRAM, you can just invoke volare enable --pdk sky130 without the commit hash and Volare will automatically extract the version required by the utility. Once again, if you omit the --pdk argument, sky130 will be used as a default.
For special cases, i.e. you require other libraries, you'll have to build the PDK yourself, which Volare does support.
You'll either need Magic installed or you'll need to pass the flag --build-magic to build Magic ad-hoc for the PDK build, the latter option of which is only supported on Linux and requires all of Magic's dependencies to be installed. On Ubuntu, that's:
sudo apt-get install -y python3 tcsh tcl-dev tk-dev libcairo2-dev m4
You can invoke volare build --help for more options. Be aware, the built PDK won't automatically be enabled and you'll have to volare enable the appropriate version.
The Apache License, version 2.0. See 'License'.
VOLARE VERSION MANAGER
Vendor
Efabless
PDK
Free