Live data from Hacker News

Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

fossi-foundation.org

201–210 of 404 posts

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

#201
post #119

Could someone explain, is there any advantage of producing a 130nm custom SoC compared to using a lower node FPGA for the same design?

Current consumption. FPGAs are quite energy intensive compared to ASICs. Also for analog stuff you can't use FPGAs. And if you need an ASIC anyways for that why not include the digital part as well?

The crossover point where ASICs become less expensive than FPGAs is also lower than you might think even including mask costs, provided it's on an older process node.

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

#202
post #154

So, this doesn't appear to have been announced by google. It does seem to be real but the OP may be jumping the gun a bit. The authoritative source seems to be the slides of this guy at google: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vRtwZPc8ykkk... From the slides this is "current plans, subject to change". This is an 'open source shuttle process'. Shuttle processes are a relatively cheap way of making small…

Maybe watch the talk first before commenting? All these questions are answered in the talk.

[deleted]

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

#203

Any Chisel developers here ? How fast is the iterative development and library ecosystem compared to native traditional RTL design tools ?

I'm one of the Chisel devs.

My biased view is that iterative development with Chisel, to the point of functional verification, is going to be faster than in a traditional RTL language primarily because you have a robust unit testing framework for Scala (Scalatest) and a library for testing Chisel hardware, ChiselTest [^1]. Basically, adopting test driven development is zero-cost---most Chisel users are writing tests as they're designing hardware.

Note that there are existing options that help bridge this gap for Verilog/VHDL like VUnit [^2] and cocotb [^3].

For libraries, there's multiple levels. The Chisel standard library is providing basic hardware modules, e.g., queues, counters, arbiters, delay pipes, and pseudo-random number generators, as well as common interfaces, e.g., valid and ready/valid. Then there's an IP contributions repo (motivated by something like the old tensorflow contrib package) where people can add third-party larger IP [^4]. Then there's the level of standalone large IP built using Chisel that you can use like the Rocket Chip RISC-V SoC generator [^5], an OpenPOWER microprocessor [^6], or a systolic array machine learning accelerator [^7].

There are comparable efforts for building standard libraries in SystemVerilog, notably BaseJump STL [^8], though SystemVerilog's limited parameterization and lack of parametric polymorphism limit what's possible. You can also find lots of larger IP ready to use in traditional languages, e.g., a RISC-V core [^9]. Just because the user base of traditional languages is larger, you'll likely find more IP in those languages.

[^1]: https://github.com/ucb-bar/chisel-testers2

[^2]: https://vunit.github.io/

[^3]: https://docs.cocotb.org/en/latest/

[^4]: https://github.com/freechipsproject/ip-contributions

[^5]: https://github.com/chipsalliance/rocket-chip

[^6]: https://github.com/antonblanchard/chiselwatt

[^7]: https://github.com/ucb-bar/gemmini

[^8]: https://github.com/bespoke-silicon-group/basejump_stl

[^9]: https://github.com/openhwgroup/cva6

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

#204
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you hand them GDSII then fiddling with it is very time-consuming and difficult, but can be spotted by looking at the resulting chip under a microscope. (Not entirely simple at 130nm as this is shorter than the wavelength of visible light!)

You don't need to look at the smallest features of a transistor to notice that the chip has 30% more transistors than your original design.

Also, adding something like that would be an incredible amount of work. Basically you would have to totally re-do the layout even if you're just adding a macro somewhere and totally re-design it if you're not going to end up causing a drastic decrease in max clock rate. That's for an management engine or tracking style thing. A backdoor that makes #5F0A40A3 equal to every other number for password bypass wouldn't be that invasive and might only slow things down by a little bit so I guess that's a possibility if a certain design becomes really popular?

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

#205

Can I in theory build one optimised for running one program? Will it be of any benefit?

Generally you get somewhere between 2 and 3 orders of magnitude power/performance benefit from realizing an algorithm in hardware if it's suitable for that sort of thing. If you're dealing with random memory accesses from a large pool it won't be but streaming tasks like media codecs or encryption work really well.

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

#206
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 possib…

http://www.myirtech.com/list.asp?id=630 looks nice for something under 300$ AND 4GB RAM, but i think the embedded quad-core ARM is still faster than anything you can 'emulate' on the FPGA.

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

#207
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.

There is an open PR adding support for the OpenROAD tools [^1]. So, there should be a flow that uses open source VLSI tools eventually.

The Google 130nm library is still filling a huge gap as all the open PDKs up to this point were "fake" educational libraries, e.g., FreePDK [^2]. You can run them through the a VLSI flow, but you can't tape them out.

[^1]: https://github.com/ucb-bar/hammer/pull/584

[^2]: https://www.eda.ncsu.edu/wiki/FreePDK

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have data to back this up? Because all accounts I've heard say that it's incredibly difficult to make money in open source.

Making money only writing open source is possible, but complicated and out of scope for this comment. But writing some open source - making your tools (compilers, linters, runtimes), libraries, frameworks, monitoring, sysops/sysadmin tooling, and so on open source is much more profitable, and that's a huge subdomain of open source out there right now.

This doesn't really answer my question though. Seems like the other comment to my question is spot on. If you divide all company actions into making money or saving money then open sourcing your toolset is more of a saving money thing as you can get people who aren't on your payroll to contribute to them. That's all well and good but not exactly what I think of when someone says "making money with open source."

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

#209
post #194

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…

There are various forms of cooperation too. Lions merge with cheetahs to hopefully starve the leopards out, then they domesticate emus and antelopes so that they can survive scorching the rest of the savannah so they don't have to deal with those pesky wild dogs. Then they see tigers doing the same in India and say “hey let's agree that you can run rampant through Africa if we can run rampant through India, but we agree on these shared limits so that we are not in conflict.”

A favorite example is that us legislation to ban advertisements for smoking was sponsored by the tobacco industry. They were spending a lot on ads just to keep up with the Joneses; if Camel voluntarily stopped and Marlboro continued, then Camel would go the way of Lucky Strike. They would rather agree to cut their expenditures! But they needed to make sure no other young tobacco whippersnappers came in and started showing a couple ads which they would have to both best, reigniting the war.

Open source is interesting because it seems to be a marvelous unexpected outcome from the existence of the corporation. Individual people start to work at corporations and are aware that whatever they produce at that corporation is mortal, it will die with that corporation if that corporation decides to stop maintaining it or if that corporation itself folds. The individual wants his or her labor to survive longer, to become immortal. This company could go out of business and I will still have these tools at my next job. So in some sense layered self-interests create a push towards corporate cooperation.

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

#210
post #108
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would have problems with licensing the 68k ISA. I believe freescale currently owns the architecture, and still manufactures some 68k microcontroller cores.

Interesting thing to consider. I wonder how actively people want to protect 68k, as not even Freescale/NXP seems to use it anymore. Shouldn't that already be problematic for the 68k projects in hardware through FPGAs? Apollo already does it and sells hardware, and the MiSTER project also does it by releasing FPGA designs for e.g. the Sega Genesis which has a 68k processor. Is it a different story if you embed 68k in…

Texas Instruments still sells graphing calculators with 68k processors (TI-89 series, most commonly)
Post reply on HN