Hardware Podcasts

More Tales from the Bringup Lab

Oxide and Friends · 19 Apr 2022 · 2h 07m · Episode 12

What this episode covers

Bryan Cantrill and the Oxide Computer Company team, including Arjen Roodselaar, Eric Aasen, and Matt Keeter, detail the bring-up of Sidecar, a switching board based on the Intel Tofino 2 ASIC, and Gimlet, their compute node. They discuss the extreme difficulty of designing the Power Delivery Network (PDN) to handle 300-amp load steps with only 7 millivolts of margin, requiring a custom 'load slammer' for testing. The team also recounts debugging firmware and hardware issues, including TOML parsing errors, slew rate mismatches on SPI traces, and a critical 500-ohm pull-down resistor error on the T6 NIC that nearly halted production.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Oxide Computer Company, Intel, AMD, Renaissance, Renesas, Infineon
Products
Gimlet, Sidecar
Chips
Tofino 2, EPYC, T6, VSC 7448, ASIC
Tools
Load Slammer, Simplus
Also
TOML, PCB, PCIe, SPI, I2C, PDN

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