I've spent some time in the chip industry. It is awful, backwards, and super far behind. I didn't appreciate the full power of open source until I saw an industry that operates without it.
Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k. Also, it's an absolutely terrible linter by software standards. In software, linters combine the best ideas from thousands of engineers across dozens of companies building on each other's ideas over multiple decades. In hardware, linters combine the best ideas of a single team, because everything is closed and proprietary and your own special 'secret sauce'.
In software, I can import things for free like nginx and mysql and we have insanely complex compilers like llvm that are completely free. In hardware, the equivalent libraries are both 1-2 orders of magnitude less sophisticated (a disadvantage of everyone absolutely refusing to share knowledge with each other and let other people build on your own ideas for free), and also are going to cost you 6+ figures for anything remotely involved.
Hardware is in the stone age of sophistication, and it entirely boils down to the fact that people don't work together to make bigger, more sophisticated projects. Genuinely would not surprise me if a strong open source community could push the capabilities of a 130nm stack beyond what many 7nm projects are capable of, simply because of the knowledge gap that would start to develop between the open and closed world.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. In economics, the value of competition is well understood and widely lauded, but the power of cooperation seems to be valued much less - cooperation simply doesn't seem as fashionable. But the FOSS world gives me hope - it shows me a world where cooperation is encouraged, and works really, really well. Where the best available solution isn't just the one that was made by a single team in a successful company that managed to beat everyone else (and which may or may not have just gotten into a dominant position via e.g. bigger marketing spend). It's a true meritocracy, and the best ideas and tools don't just succeed and beat out everything else, they are also copied, so their innovation makes their competitors better too - and unlike the business world, this is seen as a plus. The best solutions end up combining the innovation and brilliance of a much larger group of people than any one team in the cutthroat world of traditional business. Just think about how much effort is wasted around the world every day by hundreds of thousands of companies reinventing the wheel because the thousands of other existing solutions to that exact problem were also created behind closed doors. Think about how much of this pointless duplication FOSS has already saved us from! I really hope the value of cooperation and the example set by FOSS can spread to more parts of society.
I've also worked on the hardware side a bit as well as in EDA (Electronic Design Automation)- the software used to design hardware. Since you already commented on the hardware side of things, I'll comment on the EDA side. The EDA industry is also very backwards and highly insular - it felt like an old boys club. When I worked in EDA in the late aughts we were still using a version of gcc from about 2000. They did not trust the C++ STL so they continued to use their own containers from the mid-90s - they did not want to use C++ templates at all so generic programming was out. While we did run Linux it was also a very ancient version of RedHat - about 4 years behind. The company was also extremely siloed - we could probably have reused a lot of code from other groups that were doing some similar things, but there was absolutely no communication between the groups let alone some kind of central code repo.
EDA is very essential for chip development at this point and it seems like an industry ripe for disruption. We're seeing some inroads by open source EDA software - simulators (Icarus, Verilator, GHDL), synthesis (yosys) and even open cores and SOC constructors like LiteX. In software land we've had open source compilers for over 30 years now (gcc for example), let's hope that some of these open source efforts make some serious inroads in EDA.
> Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k.
the thing is that i think the open source software is a miracle that it even exists, and i don't find it strange that nowhere else has replicated the success. Because open source, at heart, is quite altruistic.
I have thought about this at one point and have many friends in the EDA industry. I can say with conviction that you are absolutely right. If you want to imagine a parallel to software, just imagine what would have happened to open source movement if gcc did not existed. that is the first choke point in eda and then there are proprietary libraries for everything. add to this an intentionally inoptimal software designed to maximize the revenue and you get a taste of where we are at this point. IMO the best thing that can happen is some company or a consortium of fabless silicon companies buy up a underdog EDA company and just opensource everything including code/patents/bugreports. I'd bet within a few years we would have more progress than we had in last 30 years.
I think the underlying issue here is that IC design is one or two orders of magnitude more complex than software. In my experience, the bar for entry into actual IC design is generally a masters or PhD in electrical engineering. There is a lot that goes into the design of an IC. Everything from the design itself to simulation, emulation, and validation. Then, depending on just how complex your IC is, you have to also think about integration with firmware and everything that involves as well.
> Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k
Another interesting open source EDA project coming out of Google is Verible: https://github.com/google/verible which provides Verilog linting amongst other things.
This is a reality that exists in any limited market. Tools like nginx and mysql count their for-profit users in the in the millions. This means that there are tremendous opportunities for supporting development. By this I mean, companies and entities who use the FOSS products to support of their for-profit business in other domains, not directly profiting from the FOSS.
FOSS development isn't cost-less. And so the business equation is always present.
The degree to which purely academic support for open source can make progress is asymptotic. People need to eat, pay rent, have a life, which means someone has to pay for something. It might not be directly related to the FOSS tool, but people have to have income in order to contribute to these efforts.
It is easy to show that something like Linux is likely the most expensive piece of software ever developed. This isn't to say the effort was not worth it. It's just to point out it wasn't free, it has a finite cost that is likely massive.
An industry such as chip design is microscopic in size in terms of the number of seats of software used around the world. I don't have a number to offer, but I would not be surprised if the user based was ten million times smaller than, say, the mysql developer population (if not a hundred million).
This means that nobody is going to be able to develop free tools without either massive altruistic corporate backing for a set of massive, complex, multi-year projects. If a company like Apple decided to invest a billion dollars to develop FOSS chip design tools and give them away, sure, it could happen. otherwise, not likely.
I am finding game development to be a tiny bit like this also: very little open source, lots of home-made clunky code, lots of NDAs and secrets. Generally, a much worse developer experience with worse tooling overall. To play devils advocate, it this makes game dev harder, which isn’t entirely bad because there is already a massive number of games being made that can’t sell, so it reduces competition a tiny bit. Also, it’s nice to know you can write a plugin and actually sell it. Still, it’s weird. The community in unreal can even be a bit unfriendly or hostile and they will sometimes mock you if you say you are trying to use Linux. Then again, unity’s community is unbelievably helpful
Could a lot of this backwardness also be explained by patents and litigation risk? There are a lot of patents around hardware, seems like there'd be a high chance of implementing something in hardware that is patented without knowing it's patented.
The whole industry still operates like the 90s right down to license management and terrible tooling. It's one of the few multi-billion dollar industries that was mostly untouched in the dotcom, and is still very old-school today.
The problem is, it's also a very, very tough industry to disrupt. Not for lack of trying though.
It’s interesting to consider this from a finance standpoint too. Consider/compare/contrast with open source software ecosystems where large amounts of money that large companies are able to effectively “strip mine” from the ecosystem.
Hopefully there is a middle ground somewhere, where the folks working on open source software can get compensated for their work so as to enable a healthier system overall, so we aren't all just “software serfs” sharecropping for our overlords.
My last job was supporting some hardware companies' design VC. Absolutely insane.
I think it's also a cultural thing. Like you said, lots of your own special secret sauce, and so many issues trying to fix bugs that may have to do with that secret sauce.
Yes 100%. Maybe software is really unique in this regard, and HN and such forums are a gift?
Tangent: I've noticed this problem in dentistry and sleep apnea! The methods of knowledge transfer in the field seem to be incredibly inefficient? Or there are tons of dentists not learning new things? (I recall a few dentists on HN -- I would be interested in any comment either way on this.)
The reason I say this is that many patients can't tolerate CPAP (>50% by some measures). There are other solutions, and judging by conversations with friends and family, dentists and doctors don't even know about them!
----
My dentist gave me one of these alternative treatments for sleep apnea, which was very effective. It's mandibular advancement device (oral appliance). Even the name is bad! They have a marketing and branding problem.
Random: Apparently Joe Rogan's dentist did a similar thing with a different device which he himself invented. Rogan mentioned it 3 times on the air.
So basically it appears to me that practitioners in this field don't exchange information in the same way that software practitioners do (to say nothing of exchanging the equivalent of working code, which is possible in theory).
I looked it up and there are apparently 200K dentists in the United States. It seems like a good area for a common forum. I think the problem is that dentists probably compete too much rather than cooperate? There is no financial incentive to set up a site of free knowledge exchange.
Related recent threads I wrote about this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666639 (related to bruxism, there seem to be a lot of dentists who don't seem to understand this, as I know multiple people with sleep apnea and bruxism who don't understand the connection)
also have you seen what passes for software in the hardware world? i’m talking about EDA. i haven’t used cadence etc but altium is an trash fire and it’s $5k/seat. below that level the tools are even more atrocious. i’m mystified why someone doesn’t come in and disrupt that space.
Absolutely. The capitalist conception of closed competition and profit motive is taken virtually as dogma nowadays. However we see its many disadvantages: there are multiple companies ("teams of people") spending billions of dollars and millions of man-hours in largely duplicated efforts which lead in the end to an inferior product that what could be done with cooperation.
Imagine a combined Intel+AMD+Samsung+Nvidia behemoth pooling together their expertise. Internal competition would still exist, but for actual technical reasons now instead of market ones. One could imagine myriad ways to fund such a cooperative endeavour, which are never even tried because the current model is sacred.
You're making an argument that open source is better because it is free. This is a 30 year old argument. The problem is, people need to get paid in the interim. For exmaple, Intel is the biggest contributer to the linux kernel, but without Intel paying its employees by charging for chips, millions of patches would never have made it into Linux. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying it is more nuanced than you are implying.
The interesting thing with open source is that it devalues the contribution of the software engineer. Your effort and ideas are now worth 0. You either do that work for free, on your spare time, or are paid by some company to write software that is seen, by the company paying you, as a commodity. Open source is at the extreme end of neoliberalism. It is really a concept from the savage capitalist mentality of the MBA bots that run the corporate world. They certainly love open source.
I think the main reason why open source has taken off is because access to a computer is available to many people, and as cost is negligible, it only required free time and enough dedication + skill to be successful. For hardware though, each compile/edit/run cycle costs money, software often has 5-digit per seat licenses, and thus the number of people with enough resources to pursue this as a hobby is quite small.
Reduce the entry cost to affordable levels, and you have increased the number of people dramatically. Which is btw also why I believe that "you can buy 32 core threadripper cpus today" isn't a good argument to ignore large compilation overhead in a code base. If possible, enable people to contribute from potatoes. Relatedly, if possible, don't require gigabit internet connections either, so downloading megabytes of precompiled artifacts that change daily isn't great either.
Not only is the software expensive it's often crap. By which I don't mean, oh no it doesn't look nice - crap as in productivity-harming.
For example, Altium Designer is probably the most modern (not most powerful although close) PCB suite and yet despite costing thousands a seat it is a slow, clunky, single-threaded (in 2020) program (somehow uses 20% of a 7700k at 4.6GHz with an empty design). Discord also thinks that Altium Designer is some kind of Anime MMO
Even though it has a long history of open-source attempts, as pointed out by Tim in his presentation, they are few and far between, and massively underwhelming compared to the thriving open source software community.
However, if this initiative takes off, it'll be a big help in creating an open source EDA toolchain community.
Very similar to what you just said, I suspect that a driving factor in the state of open source in hardware is that anyone working in hardware almost be definition has a large corporate backing, since producing hardware is so capital intensive (compared to software).
If that is basically a given, why publish anything for free, when you can instead charge 10k/seat in licensing?
Sounds like there should be open source software for such a thing? I bet the software for laying out transistors and so on will suddenly become viable with something like this, good idea Google!
Strategically, could this be part of a response to Apple silicon?
Or put another way, Apple and Google are both responding to Intel/the market’s failure to innovate enough in idiosyncratic manner:
- Apple treats lower layers as core, and brings everything in-house;
- Google treats lower layers as a threat and tries to open-source and commodify them to undermine competitors.
I don’t mean this free fabbing can compete chip-for-chip with Apple silicon of course, just that this could be a building block in a strategy similar to Android vs iOS: create a broad ecosystem of good-enough, cheap, open-source alternatives to a high-value competitor, in order to ensure that competitor does not gain a stranglehold on something that matters to Google’s money-making products.
These are not related at all. Only common element is making silicon.
Apple spends $100+ millions to design high performance microarchitecture to high-end process for their own products.
Google gives tiny amount of help to hobbyists so that they can make chips for legacy nodes. Nice thing to do, nothing to do with Apple SoC.
---
Software people in HN constantly confuse two completely different things
(1) Optimized high performance microarchitecture for the latest prosesses and large volumes. This can cost $100s of millions and the work is repeated every few years for a new process. Every design is closely optimized for the latest fab technology.
(2) Generic ASIC design for process that is few generations old. Software costs few $k or $10ks and you can uses the same design long time.
My first reaction was that it could be a recruitment drive of sorts to help build up their hardware team. Apple have been really smart in the last decade in buying up really good chip development teams and that is experience that is really hard to find.
TFA doesn't really summarize what's available very well, so let me take a shot from a technical perspective:
- 130 nm process built with Skywater foundry
- Skywater Platform Development Kit (PDK) is currently digital-only
- 40 projects will be selected for fabrication
- 10 mm^2 area available per-project
- Will use a standard harness with a RISC-V core and RAM
- Each project will get back ~100 ICs
- All projects must be open source via Git - Verilog and gate-level layout
I'm curious to see how aggresive designs get with analog components, given that they can be laid out in the GDS, but the PDK doesn't support it yet.
From a hobbyist and preservation perspective, it would be cool if this could be used to produce some form of the Apollo 68080 core to revive the 68k architecture a little bit, and build out the Debian m68k port [0][1]. The last "big" 68k chips were produced in 1995 (that would be a 350nm process?) so this could be hugely improved on 130nm. The 68080 core is currently implemented in FPGAs only and is already the fastest 68k hardware out there. With a real chip, people could continue upgrading their Amigas and Ataris.
[0]: http://www.apollo-core.com/ I can't easily find how "open source" it is though, but it's free to download.
I believe that a lot of people here might be interested in "Minimal Fab", developed by a consortium of Japanese entities.
These are kiosk-sized machines that a company can use to set up a fab with a few million dollars. Any individual can then design a chip and have it fabricated very (as in "I want to make a chip for fun") affordably.
I was not able to find a ton of information on this, but the 190nm process was supposedly ready last year and there were plans to go below this. The wafers are 12mm in diameter (so basically, one wafer -> one chip) and the clean room is just a small chamber inside the photolithography machine. There are also no masks involved, just direct "drawing".
My advice to anyone who's looking for a pathway into open source silicon is to look into E-Beam lithography. Effectively E-Beam lithography involves using a scanning electron microscope to expose a resist on silicon. This process is normally considered to slow for industrial production but it's simplicity and size make it ideal for prototyping and photo mask production.
The simplistic explanation for why this works is that electron beams can be easily focused using magnetic lenses into a beam that reaches the nano meter level.
These beams can then be deflected and controlled electronically which is what makes it possible to effectively make a cpu from a cad file.
Furthermore, It's very easy to see how the complexity of photolithography goes up exponentially as we scale down.
Therefore I believe it makes sense to abandon the concept of photolithography entirely if we want open souce silicon. I believe that this approach offers something similar to the sort of economics that enable 3D printers to become localized centers of automated manufacturing.
I should also mention that commercial E-beam machines are pretty expensive (something like 1-Mil) but that I dont think it would be that difficult to engineer one for a mere fraction of that price.
How much has the power efficiency improved between 130nm and 7nm? Is it plausible to get better performance/watt for a custom chip on 130nm vs a software application running on a 7m chip? I get that hardware has other benefits but just wondering for accelerators where the cost/benefit starts to make sense.
I should note there's open source ASIC toolchain - OpenROAD[1][2]. I wonder if these can be integrated. You also can use SymbiFlow to run your prototype in FPGA[3][4].
Previously MOSIS would run select a few student/research designs to go along with the commercial MPW runs, frequently on pretty modern fabs. I'm not really sure how much they still run.
> All open source chip designs qualify, no further strings attached!
Surely they have some threshold requirements that the thing actually works? How is this going to work? I mean, if there's no investment required from me, what's the incentive for me to verify my design properly? What's the point in them fabbing a load of fatally bugged open-source designs?
With the PDK being open, does anyone know if any kind of NDAs are still required to get a chip fabbed? While free-of-charge fabbing is quite nice, I think being NDA-free is even more important so all work including the tweaks necessary for fabbing can be published, e.g. on GitHub.
BTW, it will be nice to try this together with the OpenROAD tools [1]. They have support for Google's PDK on their to-do list (planned for q3, but I doubt it will be ready that fast).
That sounds pretty huge. I've never seen on Hackaday or similar people getting small runs of chip fabbed. What are the broader implications of this? Will other fabs start to lower the barrier to production as well?
This reminds me of how cubesats kind of got off the ground because some launch commpanies allowed extra spare capacity to be sold or donated to student projects.
Can someone please tell me how photo-masks are produced? I don't understand how can tiny features be printed at almost the same scale as a final structure? With a laser beam?
Say, as an input you have a layer description (schematics) - how can you transfer it to a tiny scale so precisely to produce a mask?
My understanding of ASIC production, is that new circuit designs are capital intensive, they require masks to be produced and machines to be configured for the given pattern.
Are older processes more automated?
Can the 130nm production line, produce many different designs without any manual intervention?
[+] [-] Taek|5 years ago|reply
Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k. Also, it's an absolutely terrible linter by software standards. In software, linters combine the best ideas from thousands of engineers across dozens of companies building on each other's ideas over multiple decades. In hardware, linters combine the best ideas of a single team, because everything is closed and proprietary and your own special 'secret sauce'.
In software, I can import things for free like nginx and mysql and we have insanely complex compilers like llvm that are completely free. In hardware, the equivalent libraries are both 1-2 orders of magnitude less sophisticated (a disadvantage of everyone absolutely refusing to share knowledge with each other and let other people build on your own ideas for free), and also are going to cost you 6+ figures for anything remotely involved.
Hardware is in the stone age of sophistication, and it entirely boils down to the fact that people don't work together to make bigger, more sophisticated projects. Genuinely would not surprise me if a strong open source community could push the capabilities of a 130nm stack beyond what many 7nm projects are capable of, simply because of the knowledge gap that would start to develop between the open and closed world.
[+] [-] m12k|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|5 years ago|reply
EDA is very essential for chip development at this point and it seems like an industry ripe for disruption. We're seeing some inroads by open source EDA software - simulators (Icarus, Verilator, GHDL), synthesis (yosys) and even open cores and SOC constructors like LiteX. In software land we've had open source compilers for over 30 years now (gcc for example), let's hope that some of these open source efforts make some serious inroads in EDA.
[+] [-] chii|5 years ago|reply
the thing is that i think the open source software is a miracle that it even exists, and i don't find it strange that nowhere else has replicated the success. Because open source, at heart, is quite altruistic.
[+] [-] tlrobinson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DesiLurker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kickopotomus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gchadwick|5 years ago|reply
Another interesting open source EDA project coming out of Google is Verible: https://github.com/google/verible which provides Verilog linting amongst other things.
[+] [-] robomartin|5 years ago|reply
FOSS development isn't cost-less. And so the business equation is always present.
The degree to which purely academic support for open source can make progress is asymptotic. People need to eat, pay rent, have a life, which means someone has to pay for something. It might not be directly related to the FOSS tool, but people have to have income in order to contribute to these efforts.
It is easy to show that something like Linux is likely the most expensive piece of software ever developed. This isn't to say the effort was not worth it. It's just to point out it wasn't free, it has a finite cost that is likely massive.
An industry such as chip design is microscopic in size in terms of the number of seats of software used around the world. I don't have a number to offer, but I would not be surprised if the user based was ten million times smaller than, say, the mysql developer population (if not a hundred million).
This means that nobody is going to be able to develop free tools without either massive altruistic corporate backing for a set of massive, complex, multi-year projects. If a company like Apple decided to invest a billion dollars to develop FOSS chip design tools and give them away, sure, it could happen. otherwise, not likely.
[+] [-] gentleman11|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marktangotango|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobiekr|5 years ago|reply
The problem is, it's also a very, very tough industry to disrupt. Not for lack of trying though.
[+] [-] stock_toaster|5 years ago|reply
Hopefully there is a middle ground somewhere, where the folks working on open source software can get compensated for their work so as to enable a healthier system overall, so we aren't all just “software serfs” sharecropping for our overlords.
[+] [-] ian-g|5 years ago|reply
I think it's also a cultural thing. Like you said, lots of your own special secret sauce, and so many issues trying to fix bugs that may have to do with that secret sauce.
Can't say I miss it at all really.
[+] [-] chubot|5 years ago|reply
Tangent: I've noticed this problem in dentistry and sleep apnea! The methods of knowledge transfer in the field seem to be incredibly inefficient? Or there are tons of dentists not learning new things? (I recall a few dentists on HN -- I would be interested in any comment either way on this.)
The reason I say this is that many patients can't tolerate CPAP (>50% by some measures). There are other solutions, and judging by conversations with friends and family, dentists and doctors don't even know about them!
----
My dentist gave me one of these alternative treatments for sleep apnea, which was very effective. It's mandibular advancement device (oral appliance). Even the name is bad! They have a marketing and branding problem.
Random: Apparently Joe Rogan's dentist did a similar thing with a different device which he himself invented. Rogan mentioned it 3 times on the air.
So basically it appears to me that practitioners in this field don't exchange information in the same way that software practitioners do (to say nothing of exchanging the equivalent of working code, which is possible in theory).
I looked it up and there are apparently 200K dentists in the United States. It seems like a good area for a common forum. I think the problem is that dentists probably compete too much rather than cooperate? There is no financial incentive to set up a site of free knowledge exchange.
Related recent threads I wrote about this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666639 (related to bruxism, there seem to be a lot of dentists who don't seem to understand this, as I know multiple people with sleep apnea and bruxism who don't understand the connection)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435964 (the book Jaws)
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dehrmann|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techslave|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aswanson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrepd|5 years ago|reply
Imagine a combined Intel+AMD+Samsung+Nvidia behemoth pooling together their expertise. Internal competition would still exist, but for actual technical reasons now instead of market ones. One could imagine myriad ways to fund such a cooperative endeavour, which are never even tried because the current model is sacred.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] staycoolboy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josemanuel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] est31|5 years ago|reply
I think the main reason why open source has taken off is because access to a computer is available to many people, and as cost is negligible, it only required free time and enough dedication + skill to be successful. For hardware though, each compile/edit/run cycle costs money, software often has 5-digit per seat licenses, and thus the number of people with enough resources to pursue this as a hobby is quite small.
Reduce the entry cost to affordable levels, and you have increased the number of people dramatically. Which is btw also why I believe that "you can buy 32 core threadripper cpus today" isn't a good argument to ignore large compilation overhead in a code base. If possible, enable people to contribute from potatoes. Relatedly, if possible, don't require gigabit internet connections either, so downloading megabytes of precompiled artifacts that change daily isn't great either.
[+] [-] mhh__|5 years ago|reply
For example, Altium Designer is probably the most modern (not most powerful although close) PCB suite and yet despite costing thousands a seat it is a slow, clunky, single-threaded (in 2020) program (somehow uses 20% of a 7700k at 4.6GHz with an empty design). Discord also thinks that Altium Designer is some kind of Anime MMO
[+] [-] fhssn1|5 years ago|reply
Even though it has a long history of open-source attempts, as pointed out by Tim in his presentation, they are few and far between, and massively underwhelming compared to the thriving open source software community.
However, if this initiative takes off, it'll be a big help in creating an open source EDA toolchain community.
[+] [-] hamandcheese|5 years ago|reply
If that is basically a given, why publish anything for free, when you can instead charge 10k/seat in licensing?
[+] [-] andy_ppp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leojfc|5 years ago|reply
Or put another way, Apple and Google are both responding to Intel/the market’s failure to innovate enough in idiosyncratic manner:
- Apple treats lower layers as core, and brings everything in-house;
- Google treats lower layers as a threat and tries to open-source and commodify them to undermine competitors.
I don’t mean this free fabbing can compete chip-for-chip with Apple silicon of course, just that this could be a building block in a strategy similar to Android vs iOS: create a broad ecosystem of good-enough, cheap, open-source alternatives to a high-value competitor, in order to ensure that competitor does not gain a stranglehold on something that matters to Google’s money-making products.
[+] [-] Nokinside|5 years ago|reply
Apple spends $100+ millions to design high performance microarchitecture to high-end process for their own products.
Google gives tiny amount of help to hobbyists so that they can make chips for legacy nodes. Nice thing to do, nothing to do with Apple SoC.
---
Software people in HN constantly confuse two completely different things
(1) Optimized high performance microarchitecture for the latest prosesses and large volumes. This can cost $100s of millions and the work is repeated every few years for a new process. Every design is closely optimized for the latest fab technology.
(2) Generic ASIC design for process that is few generations old. Software costs few $k or $10ks and you can uses the same design long time.
[+] [-] janekm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy_ppp|5 years ago|reply
My guess would be a cloud based chip design software is in the works. This would accelerate AI quite a bit I should think?
[+] [-] timerol|5 years ago|reply
- 130 nm process built with Skywater foundry - Skywater Platform Development Kit (PDK) is currently digital-only - 40 projects will be selected for fabrication - 10 mm^2 area available per-project - Will use a standard harness with a RISC-V core and RAM - Each project will get back ~100 ICs - All projects must be open source via Git - Verilog and gate-level layout
I'm curious to see how aggresive designs get with analog components, given that they can be laid out in the GDS, but the PDK doesn't support it yet.
[+] [-] DCKing|5 years ago|reply
[0]: http://www.apollo-core.com/ I can't easily find how "open source" it is though, but it's free to download.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23668057
[+] [-] d_tr|5 years ago|reply
These are kiosk-sized machines that a company can use to set up a fab with a few million dollars. Any individual can then design a chip and have it fabricated very (as in "I want to make a chip for fun") affordably.
I was not able to find a ton of information on this, but the 190nm process was supposedly ready last year and there were plans to go below this. The wafers are 12mm in diameter (so basically, one wafer -> one chip) and the clean room is just a small chamber inside the photolithography machine. There are also no masks involved, just direct "drawing".
[+] [-] patwillson22|5 years ago|reply
The simplistic explanation for why this works is that electron beams can be easily focused using magnetic lenses into a beam that reaches the nano meter level.
These beams can then be deflected and controlled electronically which is what makes it possible to effectively make a cpu from a cad file.
Furthermore, It's very easy to see how the complexity of photolithography goes up exponentially as we scale down.
Therefore I believe it makes sense to abandon the concept of photolithography entirely if we want open souce silicon. I believe that this approach offers something similar to the sort of economics that enable 3D printers to become localized centers of automated manufacturing.
I should also mention that commercial E-beam machines are pretty expensive (something like 1-Mil) but that I dont think it would be that difficult to engineer one for a mere fraction of that price.
[+] [-] why_only_15|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xvilka|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://theopenroadproject.org/
[2] https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project/OpenROAD
[3] https://symbiflow.github.io/
[4] https://github.com/SymbiFlow
[+] [-] StillBored|5 years ago|reply
https://www.themosisservice.com/university-support
Previously MOSIS would run select a few student/research designs to go along with the commercial MPW runs, frequently on pretty modern fabs. I'm not really sure how much they still run.
(oh here is the MOSIS/TSMC runs for this year https://www.mosis.com/db/pubf/fsched?ORG=TSMC)
[+] [-] kingosticks|5 years ago|reply
Surely they have some threshold requirements that the thing actually works? How is this going to work? I mean, if there's no investment required from me, what's the incentive for me to verify my design properly? What's the point in them fabbing a load of fatally bugged open-source designs?
[+] [-] moring|5 years ago|reply
BTW, it will be nice to try this together with the OpenROAD tools [1]. They have support for Google's PDK on their to-do list (planned for q3, but I doubt it will be ready that fast).
[1] https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project https://theopenroadproject.org/
[+] [-] tdonovic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cromwellian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quyleanh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dTal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] truth_seeker|5 years ago|reply
How fast is the iterative development and library ecosystem compared to native traditional RTL design tools ?
[+] [-] novaRom|5 years ago|reply
Say, as an input you have a layer description (schematics) - how can you transfer it to a tiny scale so precisely to produce a mask?
[+] [-] WatchDog|5 years ago|reply
Are older processes more automated?
Can the 130nm production line, produce many different designs without any manual intervention?
[+] [-] jitendrac|5 years ago|reply
Even engineers/students from countries with less resources will now be able to design make prototypes in viable way.