Installing the EDA Tool set

Table of contents

  1. Installing apt available packages
  2. Installing Magic VLSI
  3. Installing the PDK
  4. Adding env variables to .bashrc

The goal of this guide is to install the open-source EDA Tool set, and configure correctly the Skywater PDK. The following apps will be installed:

  1. Magic VLSI
  2. Netgen LVS
  3. NGSpice

Installing apt available packages

Make sure to have git and make already installed. Since NGSpice and Netgen are available as pre-compiled packages, we can install them using apt too.

sudo apt install -y git make netgen-lvs ngspice ngspice-doc build-essential

Installing Magic VLSI

Since the PDK requires Magic 8.3.177 or higher, we’ll build the latest version from source. First install the required dependencies using apt.

sudo apt install -y m4 tcsh csh libx11-dev tcl-dev tk-dev libcairo2-dev mesa-common-dev libglu1-mesa-dev

Then, clone the git repository, and change the working directory to cloned repository.

git clone git://opencircuitdesign.com/magic
cd magic/

Finally, run the configuration script, compile and install magic into the default path /user/local/

./configure
make
sudo make install

Installing the PDK

After installing the needed tools, we can install the SkyWater PDK. Since installing the full PDK is slow and requires a lot of storage, we’ll install a minimal version with the needed cells.

First we clone the Skywater repository, and initialize the needed submodules.

Warning

Make sure to go back to your home directory.

cd ~/
git clone https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk
cd skywater-pdk/
git submodule init libraries/sky130_fd_io/latest
git submodule init libraries/sky130_fd_pr/latest
git submodule init libraries/sky130_fd_sc_hd/latest
git submodule update
make timing

Now, clone the Open PDKs repo to configure and install the repository. Since we already cloned the PDK repo, we’ll indicate the configuration script where to find it, instead of pulling the full repo.

Warning

Make sure to go back to your home directory.

cd ~/
git clone git://opencircuitdesign.com/open_pdks
cd open_pdks/
./configure --enable-sky130-pdk=~/skywater-pdk
make
sudo make install

Now we can clean the generated files

make distclean

If desired, the installation repos can also ve removed to free additional storage.

cd ~/
rm -rf magic/

Adding env variables to .bashrc

Copy and paste the following commands to add the environment variables to your .bashrc file.

echo "export PDK_ROOT=\"/usr/local/share/pdk\"" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "export PDK_PATH=\"\$PDK_ROOT/sky130A\"" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "alias magicsky=\"magic -T \$PDK_PATH/libs.tech/magic/sky130A.tech\"" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Now you can use magicsky to run magic with the PDK tech file.

Table of contents