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Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

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Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

#41

Post by mhh__ »

est31 wrote: post #6

This is amazing. 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…

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

Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

#44

Post by baybal2 »

pjc50 wrote: post #35
why_only_15 wrote: post #8

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.

> Is it plausible to get better performance/watt for a custom chip on 130nm vs a software application running on a 7m chip? This very, very much depends on what the algorithm is (integer or FP? how data dependent?), but I would say no for almost all interesting cases. The only exception would be if you're doing a "mixed signal" chip where some of the processing is inherently analogue and you can save power compared t…

> Another exception might be low leakage construction, because that gets worse as the process gets smaller. This is only valuable if your chip is off almost all of the time and you want to squeeze down exactly how many nanoamps "off" actually consumes.

No, you actually have more leakage at older nodes, what changes is the ratio of current spent on leakage vs. current spent doing something useful.

Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

#47

Post by quyleanh »

stephen_g wrote: post #16
quyleanh wrote: post #12

Well done Google. But there is still problem with EDA tool license... Is there any replacement for Cadence Virtuoso tool for chip design?

The efabless people that the talk mentions a bunch of times are using a fully open-source design flow but I think it's a bit hacky (as in, a bunch of command line tools from various open source projects, some of which may be unmaintained judging by the commit logs). They seem to have successfully fabricated a RISC-V based SoC with it though, which is crazy cool. As somebody with a decent amount of FPGA experience, ha…

It is a bit complicated, isn't it? I do hope someday, there is solution which is fully opensource for this problem. And it's seems that this day will be long.

Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

#48

Post by baybal2 »

dTal wrote: post #25

Can anyone venture a guess as to why Google might be doing this? What's the incentive structure here?

They want to spur competition among silicon suppliers.

The industry has become dangerously too consolidated, with like of Avago/Broadcomm trying to buy themselves a monopoly.

The big semi look at big dotcoms like Google as cows to milk, obviously they don't like it.

Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

#49

Post by herio »

DCKing wrote: post #31

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 faste…

The Apollo core is not open source.

There are some other pretty nice and featured 68k cores that are open source (TG68, WF68K30L etc.) but none that is really close to the features and performance of the Apollo 68080.

Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

#50

Post by PopeDotNinja »

quyleanh wrote: post #12

Well done Google. But there is still problem with EDA tool license... Is there any replacement for Cadence Virtuoso tool for chip design?

Maybe we could get Cadence to open source 20 year old software for the 20 year old 130nm chips!
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