open-source-silicon.dev

So speaking of antennas, what's the size of a tinytapeout slot so I know how big I can make an intentional antenna

<@U017B06CK3K> One tile unit is ~ 160u wide by 100u high. And design can be up to 8 tile wide and 2 tile high, so that would be around 1.2mm wide and 200u high.

I'm just curious why so much wider than tall?

The purple blocks are the first layer of muxing. They have 8 ports on top and 8 on the bottom.  So we can easily "combine" the space of several tiles (leaving some mux ports unused) to allow for larger designs, but we can mostly combine horizontally due to the layout.

Interesting.  Would it make sense to have the tile be taller than wide in that case?

<@U018LA3KZCJ> Yeah, it might change a bit in the future, but realistically a lot of design are very small and don't even take 1 tile, so we don't want to rise the size too much so we don't waste space. The  power gates are also put on the side of each module (for layout and PDN reasons) so the narrower you make them the more space the power gate area represent vs the total area.  Trying to balance a lot of things.  We're also thinking of removing some of the mux positions to allow 4 tile high design as another option to allow larger designs without compromising on the other factors.

Thanks, my curious is satisfied :slightly_smiling_face:

so using up 8 tiles for a full 1.2mm antenna would get me a wavelength of 250 Ghz, so a 1/8 wave antenna of that length would be 50Ghz, but that's probably not practical as there is a bunch of other metal and stuff that would mess up the radiated power