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…
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.
And this is the reason some companies have shift work... But that all means nothing for companies who buy Virtuoso copies from from guys trading WaReZ in pedestrian underpasses in BJ. A number of quite reputable SoC brands here in the PRD are known to be based on 100% pirated EDAs. This is not a critique, but a call to think about that a bit. In China, you can spin-up a microelectronics startup in under $1m, in USA,…
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…
> 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.
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…
How fast can those FPGAs be clocked? Is it better to have a free but small run of 68k ASICs which might have similar performance, or the potential to run a soft core on off-the-shelf FPGAs, at much higher cost per unit, but with the ability to rapidly iterate on the design?
The soft core approach has many advantages, but FPGA companies have dropped the ball on single-unit (hobbyist) sales.
Chips that cost $1000 from a distributor cost 1/10th to 1/100th the price when you have a relationship with the manufacturer, mostly because distributors can't sell them very quickly and have to keep a ton of stock to have the SKUs you want.
On a modern FPGA, processor clocks of 200-300 MHz are possible to get with designs that aren't huge.
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…
> 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.
Or it's artistic expression for a certain type of individual, and we have accessible art everywhere
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 th…
KiCad nightly can now import Altium Design files, might want to give it a try ;) https://kicad-pcb.org/blog/2020/04/Development-Highlight-Alt...
KiCad is getting very good but it requires a lot of work to compete with the big boys - for example there's no signal integrity built in, and impedance control is fairly detached from your board i.e. I don't think you can do RC on impedance control yet. I don't need a huge amount but signal integrity is fairly important for the project I'm designing.
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?
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?
Mask sets will still be required for each chip (to my knowledge), but they are significantly cheaper on older processes like 130nm.
The process design kit (or PDK) mentioned in the article takes care of "configuring the machiines". The PDK provides describes how to construct low-level primitives (the instruction set, if you will) for the specific fab. Designers then layer on their logic circuits using those primitives.
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…
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.