[pepijndevos]

Yea, I think this is an interesting approach. But FreePDK45 slides mention that it's not designed for manufacture, and there does not appear to be an easy upgrade path. So you could design a chip with FreePDK, release the design, and then redo the whole thing in a vendor PDK.

I talked to someone who worked on AsicOne, and he said that even if you make your own PDK and draw your own transistors and everything, you'll still have to sign an NDK to do the sign-off and what not. I'm not intimately familiar with the whole process myself, but from what I understand it is basically impossible to have an open source analog design that you can actually manufacture. (sure, you can make a theoretical toy thing, but if you can't manufacture it, who cares?)

[jleahy]

I'm quite familiar with the process and I believe it's entirely possible.

You will need to run foundry DRC decks, but the company you're taping out through will do this for you (I presume that you're not big enough to deal with TSMC directly). This is because a design that fails DRC could actually break other people's chips if you're sharing a wafer.

Of course if you really want to know that it'll work you need to also run foundry LVS and stimulate corners with foundry spice models and foundry PEX. But if you're gutsy you could skip this, if you believe you've put enough margin into your PDK corners.

Certainly there is zero need to redraw your transistors. Transistors are transistors, a few layers (od, poly, contact, implant, ...), there's no magic, no magic sauce. The foundry wants an SVG with overlapping rectangles (of some minimum size), nothing more.