urish / analog-virtualbox-vm-sky130a

Virtual Machine for analog with the open source Sky130A PDK

Tiny Tapeout Analog Design VM with Skywater 130 PDK

This repository contains the necessary files to build a virtual machine (VM) for analog design using the Skywater 130nm PDK.

The VM is based on Ubuntu 22.04 and includes the following tools:

• Magic
• KLayout
• Xschem
• netgen
• ngspice
• gaw
• Skywater 130nm PDK

Getting the VM

You can download the latest version of the VM from the following link:

• VirtualBox Machine - tinytapeout_analog_vm.ova

The VM is about 5 GB in size and requires about 20 GB of disk space to import. You can import the OVA file into VirtualBox by going to File -> Import Appliance and selecting the OVA file.

You can also import the OVA file into VMware Workstation Player, by going to Player -> File -> Open... and selecting the OVA file. When importing into VMware, you will see a warning about "virtual hardware compliance". Click "Retry" to continue.

Verifying the download

To verify the integrity of the OVA file using the SHA256 hash. Then run the following command in the directory where the OVA file is located:

sha256sum -c tinytapeout_analog_vm.ova.sha256

Older versions and metadata

To file the build date / commit hash from which the VM was built, download the JSON metadata file. The metadata file is also present inside the machine, under /home/ttuser/vminfo.json.

To download earlier versions of the VM, go to the actions tab, click on one of the workflow runs, and download the tt_analog_virtualbox_ova from the "Artifacts" section (note that downloading GitHub artifacts is usually slower than downloading from the link above).

Using the VM

The default username for the VM is ttuser and the password is magic. You can change the password by running the passwd command.

The desktop includes shortcuts to start Magic, KLayout, and Xschem. The Skywater 130nm PDK is installed in the /home/tt_user/pdk directory.

Troubleshooting

In case of issues with the graphics (e.g. texts do not appear inside Xschem), try disabling 3D acceleration by opening the VM settings in Virtual Box, going to the "Display" tab, and unchecking "Enable 3D Acceleration" at the bottom of the window.

Building the VM locally

To build the VM locally, you need to have Packer and VirtualBox installed. Then, run the following command:

packer init image.pkr.hcl
packer build image.pkr.hcl

Building the VM takes about 30 minutes, depending on your internet connection and hardware. The resulting OVA file will be in the outputoutput-tinytapeout_analog_vm directory.

Customizing the VM

You can customize the VM by modifying the image.pkr.hcl file. For example, you can change the amount of memory, number of CPUs, or the size of the disk.

If you wish to install additional software, you add new scripts to the scripts directory and include them in the image.pkr.hcl file, in the scripts list of the provisioner block.

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the Apache License 2.0.