Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler • Hacker News Board

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#191

Post by ur-whale » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 6:54 AM UTC

zik wrote: post #155

I'm surprised to see no recognition of yosys, arachne-pnr and the icestorm tools which together are a free and open source HDL tool chain which already exists and is pretty widely used.

These two projects are exactly the road the EDA industry should be taking.

Unfortunately, they make very slow progress because they have to painstakingly reverse-engineer everything (with the possible exception of Lattice stuff).

For Xilinx chips, where exactly nothing is publicly documented at the lower levels of the stack, they have to spend mountains of time re-discovering everything.

Even if I deeply admire the effort and how far they've gotten, I can't help but think: what a terrible waste of human talent and time.

Edit: I once asked a Xilinx employee why they didn't OpenSource their entire software stack, because it struck me that they were in the chip manufacturing business, and not in the toolchain business (a blisteringly obvious fact when you look at the quality of such monstrosities as, e.g., Vivado), and that OpenSourcing the tools would potentially enlarge their potential target market by a large margin.

The culture is so broken in that space that I don't think he even actually understood the question.

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#192

Post by jonhendry18 » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 6:54 AM UTC

techdragon wrote: post #124

mokus wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: how much of that cost is because we don’t have to fire them more?

WW2 is the only real example to answer this kind of question. For all the global skirmishes and regular war games and other exercises, since WW2 there really hasn’t been sufficient conflict to prevent manufacturing an ahead of time stockpile of desired weaponry at the prices set by companies in the military industrial complex. Price did come down in WW2 but it can be hard to attribute it specifically to “we used ever…

Multiple sourcing probably played a big role. Lots of companies were making Sherman tanks, for instance. IBM was making rifles along with many other companies.

There is no second source for the F-35.

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#193

Post by ur-whale » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 6:54 AM UTC

et2o wrote: post #110

ur-whale wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you have it backwards: this is exactly why there is actually very little risk for the big guys to actually share their knowledge. The financial entry barrier for building a fab is so huge that what in heaven's name would intel lose if they published the RTL for - say - their integer division hardware to show and teach the whole world how it's done when real professionals take a stab at it? And if they're sc…

What are the EDA discussion boards? Curious to peruse.

Here's one: https://www.edaboard.com/

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#194

Post by davidmneedham » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 6:57 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #77

ur-whale wrote: post #14

"Most importantly, we have to change the culture of hardware design. Today, we don’t have open sharing … " This, to the 100th power. The culture in the EDA industry is stuck in the 1950's when it comes to collaboration and sharing, it's very frustrating for newcomers and people who want to learn the trade. As was pointed out by someone in another hardware related HN thread, what can you expect from an industry that i…

I designed the ABEL language back in the 80's for compiling designs targeted at programmable logic arrays and gate arrays. It was very successful, but it died after a decade or so. It'd probably be around today and up to date if it was open source. A shame it isn't. I don't even know who owns the rights to it these days, or if whoever owns it even knows they have the rights to it, due to spinoffs and mergers.

I learned basic ABEL at Purdue in 2006 in the digital intro. course. "identify operators and keywords used to create ABEL programs" remains in the course objectives in 2018 (https://engineering.purdue.edu/ece270/Docs/learning_outs_and...)

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#195

Post by Taniwha » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 7:04 AM UTC

st26 wrote: post #176

slededit wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed it a lot going to trade shows that the North American market has turned so much to the high end that most people assume you need all this fancy gear to make anything. Its really stifling innovation in my opinion. People think they needs tens of thousands to get an MVP prototype out the door and most of the time it kills the idea. If you are a big company and already have the resources then by all means u…

It's been a little while since I did proto boards, but I remember a vast chasm between industrial & hobbyist, that basically forced me to wrangle packages I had no desire to deal with. You could get 4GB DDR2 DIMMs, or you could get a DIP 8kB SRAM. For a microchip you could get TQFP-32, or BGA-1000. So on and so forth. I remember a useful chip that came in nothing but QFN-16. It seemed like it wasn't I need fancy gear…

SMT soldering is seriously easy, I teach it to kids - people are just too scared by it - I've done small BGAs - hot air reflow, a fine tipped iron, and if you have old eyes like mine a stereo microscope are all you need.

I do occasionally do small (100+ pins) BGAs - for that I get a steel solder stencil made and use solder paste and a cheap Chinese reflow oven

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#196

Post by zkms » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 7:39 AM UTC

seattleeng wrote: post #159

WalterBright wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I designed the ABEL language back in the 80's for compiling designs targeted at programmable logic arrays and gate arrays. It was very successful, but it died after a decade or so. It'd probably be around today and up to date if it was open source. A shame it isn't. I don't even know who owns the rights to it these days, or if whoever owns it even knows they have the rights to it, due to spinoffs and mergers.

I think you'd be surprised. I went to Caltech (graduated 2014), which is a fairly well known university for their Electrical Engineering program, and I learned ABEL in my Sophomore/Junior year. My instructor, an admittedly old school hardware engineer, was in love with the language and had it as part of our upper level digital design curriculum for a few labs. FWIW, I think it was super intuitive and a hugely valuabl…

Was it with Glen George?

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#197

Post by kragen » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 7:39 AM UTC

xt00 wrote: post #136

namibj wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, for 90nm you should be in the 4-digit range for a hand full of prototypes.

Oh yea I was totally exaggerating since obviously the prices vary tremendously upon the what you are trying to do. I’ve previously worked for a semiconductor company, so there is sort of a “you can pay as much as you want” option always avail if you want a super awesome mixed signal chip. For the general public, do you have a particular place you are aware of that you would pay the 4 digits for the mask plus few prot…

Both CMP and MOSIS have a number of options that come in under US$10k for a handful of prototypes. Large process nodes, so they won't be competitive for digital stuff, but for analog or mostly analog mixed-signal, they might actually be able to beat anything you can buy off the shelf. Haven't tried it yet myself, though.

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#198

Post by kragen » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 7:52 AM UTC

solarkraft wrote: post #71

civilitty wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If AMD open sourced all the design aspects of their chips, I would have to get a loan to build 100 million fab to have any practical manner to enjoy it? Try $1 to 5 billion. We're talking about something that over half of all extant nation states wouldn't be able to pull off without devoting 10-50% of their annual GDP to the project.

Even the large designers (AMD, Apple, Mediatek) don't have their own fabs. You would "just" need to order a design made - probably for hundreds of thousands of chips to make any sense. Is there information on what this step would actually require?

Civilitty's answer is good, but I think the $4–$12k price is not subsidized; it's just CMP’s normal price. Older process nodes are even cheaper. MOSIS is the US equivalent of CMP. I don't know what the Chinese equivalent is but I am sure there is one.

This is a process a substantial number of undergraduate students manage to get through in a semester each year. Some universities will foot the MOSIS or CMP bill if the design passes DRCs.

You don't have to build your own fab or even get a fab to dedicate a whole wafer to you.

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#199

Post by ben_w » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 7:55 AM UTC

fjsolwmv wrote: post #143

taneq wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's also liability issues, like if they give away food and someone gets salmonella poisoning or has an allergic reaction or something then they could get sued. It sucks but it's not completely arbitrary.

That's a myth. Good Samaritan laws exempt that

In addition to possible bad press, it’s also common for people to not know the law. And as I read news stories asking if the reader knew the difference between “best before”, “sell by”, and “use by”, I would also expect some to destroy the produce out of a misguided but kind desire to avoid harming those who they could legally and effectively help.

Re: Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

#200

Post by dymk » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 8:00 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #164

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using contracts, random verification, and formal verification methods to ensure the integrity of software blocks, I believe. There's still dozens of us out there, heh.

Not just that, but there was a genuine effort to make programming more like connecting together components on a board.

How was that different than ideas found in object oriented programming?