Hi! I'm Unai, a hitchhiker in the open-source electronic design automation (EDA) galaxies. After getting a degree in Electronic Engineering and a Master degree in Advanced Electronic Systems, my trip into open-source EDA started when I enrolled in a PhD in the Engineering Physics programme with the Digital Electronics Design Group at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). There, I work on prototyping and verification of algebraic/numerical algorithms in FPGAs using VHDL 2008. Incomplete or deficient vendor support for the language, and my discovery of robust open-source solutions, got me involved in GHDL and VUnit, two of the most awersome tools out there!

In 2018, I spent six months in the Advanced Processor Technologies (APT) at the University of Manchester, an amazing city and even better beer! At the APT I worked combining Dynamic Binary Modification (DBM) tools with hardware simulation models, something I called Dynamic Binary Hardware Injection (DBHI).

Looking for a direct interface for co-simulation of VHDL together with other HDLs and programming languages, took me to the VHDL Analysis and Standardisation Group (VASG · IEEE-P1076). It turned out there was no standard solution yet, so I joined the group and now we are reworking an existing proposal for adding it to the next revision of the language!

Overall, I help reduce the usage burden and learning curve of open-source EDA tools; for easing adoption by designers using hardware description languages (HDLs):

• Contributing and co-maintaining continuous integration (CI) workflows for building, testing and documentation generation. Mostly focused on GitHub Actions, containers and MSYS2.
• Gathering common resources: an (awesome) list/index of projects, packaging/distribution solutions and constraints/metadata about boards/devices.
• Providing reproducible examples for showcasing the simulation, co-simulation and synthesis possibilities with open-source tooling. Mostly focused on VHDL, together with (System) Verilog.
• Testing open-source EDA tooling on ARM devices (SBCs, smartphones and servers). At the same time, support using QEMU along with containers for testing "native" code/scripts on non-ARM hosts; thus, avoiding cross-compilation.

My main open-source camps are GHDL, VUnit, HDL and DBHI. Moreover, I help with CI and packaging in over a dozen projects, here are some of them: VHDL, GTKWave, Verilator, Icarus Verilog, SymbiFlow (FASM), Verilog to Routing, Microwatt, FOMU, Verible, MSYS2, YosysHQ (Yosys, Nextpnr, Icestorm, fpga-toolchain), iCESugar, openFPGALoader, Serial Studio, Cobra...