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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

#191

Post by devit »

hamandcheese wrote: post #172
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…

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?

Possibly because initially the open source software will be significantly worse than the proprietary software and thus won't get any sales, and it will only be better with a lot of contributions, but then it's already freely available and so it still won't get any sales (but might get support/SaaS contracts).

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

#192

Post by MayeulC »

orbifold wrote: post #102
MayeulC wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC there are a couple ways to produce the intended design. At the end of the day, fabs often take layouts in the GDSII format, which is documented and open. The Klayout open source visualizer is industry-standard in my experience. Now, how do you generate these layouts? It depends on what you are doing. If more on the experimental side of things, writing scripts to generate structures is fine, as long as these conf…

Hammer is just a driver for tools that cost >100k to license. And that doesn't include access to memory compilers, which you would also need.

Thanks for the answer, I had forgotten about this. I looked at hammer some time ago, but we decided to go for PoC-like, less complex designs.

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

#193

Post by gchadwick »

Taek wrote: post #151

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

Another interesting open source EDA project coming out of Google is Verible: https://github.com/google/verible which provides Verilog linting amongst other things.

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

#194

Post by m12k »

naringas wrote: post #187
m12k wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

but let's not forget the non-material nature of software allows this, hardware will always be a physical (material) artifact. however the line does blur when talking about blueprints and designs. in any case, I think that free software movements are a sociological anomaly, I wonder if there is any academic research into this from an antropological or an historical economics viewpoint. also, it seems to me that in som…

I'm curious to hear what you mean when you say the entire market works in cooperation? I mean, strategic partnerships happen, and companies work as suppliers for other companies. But that's not the market - the market is where someone wanting to buy something goes and evaluates competing products and picks the one they want to buy. It's pretty comparable to natural selection, where the fittest animals survive and the fittest companies get bigger marketshare while the least fit companies go bankrupt, and the least fit species go extinct. So I guess you could say that the market functions as an ecosystem - maybe the word you were looking for was 'symbiosis' rather than cooperation? Cheetah's aren't cooperating with lions, they are competing - but relative to the rest of the ecosystem, they exist in a form of symbiosis.

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

#195

Post by mercer »

m12k wrote: post #170
Taek wrote: post #151

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…

Whatever one might think of socialism, and I really don't mean to start a political discussion here, FOSS is an example for me that shows that at the very least we're not purely driven by competition.

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

#196

Post by jecel »

fouc wrote: post #66

What are the chances that google will add their own hidden or proprietary circuitry to any open-source chips? They'll add all sorts of "Security" and "Tracking" features..

The designs have to fit in 10mm² but the total chip will be 16mm² with the pads, a RISC-V and some interfaces supplied by Google. They could obviously fit some trick into their part, but given that it too will be open source you can inspect it if you don't trust them.

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

#197

Post by CabSauce »

m12k wrote: post #170
Taek wrote: post #151

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…

  In economics, ... but the power of cooperation seems to be valued much less
I'm not sure that I agree with this. The creation of firms and trade are both cooperative. They aren't altruistic though. (I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, just that cooperation isn't valued in economics.)

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

#198

Post by mercer »

chii wrote: post #163
Taek wrote: post #151

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.

I think the principles underlying FOSS are found everywhere. It's just that the idea of 'markets' and 'transactions' being the ubiquitous thing has infected our thinking.

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

#199

Post by CabSauce »

m12k wrote: post #194
naringas wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but let's not forget the non-material nature of software allows this, hardware will always be a physical (material) artifact. however the line does blur when talking about blueprints and designs. in any case, I think that free software movements are a sociological anomaly, I wonder if there is any academic research into this from an antropological or an historical economics viewpoint. also, it seems to me that in som…

I'm curious to hear what you mean when you say the entire market works in cooperation? I mean, strategic partnerships happen, and companies work as suppliers for other companies. But that's not the market - the market is where someone wanting to buy something goes and evaluates competing products and picks the one they want to buy. It's pretty comparable to natural selection, where the fittest animals survive and the…

Trade and money are just tools to facilitate cooperation. They incentivize agents to cooperate by sharing the value of that cooperation.

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

#200

Post by jecel »

mysterydip wrote: post #114

Would this make it possible to reproduce some historic-but-rare chips like the 4004?

This is a 0.13µm CMOS process while the 4004 was made using a 10µm PMOS technology. So the electrical characteristics would not be the same. If you don't care about that then the answer is "yes".

An attempt to do something like this would have a Z80, a 6502 and a 68000 in a single chip (none of them are rare, however):

https://www.crowdsupply.com/chips4makers/retro-uc

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