Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by dclowd9901 » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 6:57 AM UTC

CabSauce wrote: post #197

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…

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.)

It’s not cooperation at the human level, and that makes all the difference. “Altruism” is a convenient dismissal of a principle (survival through cooperation) that has actually allowed humanity to survive and thrive thus far.

The trick to making it all work is that knowledge and/or tooling (the means of production) ought not be proprietary, but product or service absolutely can be.

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

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Post by riking » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 7:03 AM UTC

jiveturkey wrote: post #341

neltnerb wrote: post #270

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Ah, you're talking about this as a current-day commercial project. Carry on :-) I'm a professional PCB designer among other things. Most of what I have learned came from hard-won experience designing PCBs for projects done for myself and my own education even though a custom PCB was hardly cost effective in a commercial sense. They were just much cheaper since my time was free. They weren't useless projects in that w…

> free fab means I can finally learn how to do this hate to tell you this, but probably not. there are only 40 slots. those are going to quickly be eaten by people that already know how to do this. the fab isn't the expensive part anyway. you can get a small run of ASICs done for a few single digit $thousand

Heck, it's a whole 10 sq mm. I'm sure they could work something out to combine multiple smaller projects into one slot, muxed by the supervisor.

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

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Post by DCKing » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 7:13 AM UTC

armitron wrote: post #217

herio wrote: post #49

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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.

Note that there have been IP theft and other shadiness allegations from ex-members of the Apollo team. If you do a little research you'll find out that there's plenty of "stay away" and "can't believe they haven't been sued into oblivion yet" indicators and all sorts of misleading claims and marketing. My summary would be that it's a tightly-controlled, closed project lead by questionable people with well-documented…

It seems I have a little bit more to learn on this project. Are there any sources I could read?

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

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Post by chubot » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 7:41 AM UTC

brnt wrote: post #349

chubot wrote: post #324

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Yes 100%. Maybe software is really unique in this regard, and HN and such forums are a gift? Tangent: I've noticed this problem in dentistry and sleep apnea! The methods of knowledge transfer in the field seem to be incredibly inefficient? Or there are tons of dentists not learning new things? (I recall a few dentists on HN -- I would be interested in any comment either way on this.) The reason I say this is that man…

> mandibular advancement device Those things are in the basic apnea treatment palet over here (Netherlands), actually more common than PAP machines. Why do you think they are alternative?

Well the picture might be totally different in the Netherlands. In the US, CPAP is the most common treatment, even though so many people can't use them (including me).

I've talked to several people who have a CPAP, and they don't even know of the existence of the mandibular advancement device. Their doctors and dentists apparently don't tell them about it!

I'm puzzled why that is the case. I think it has something to do with insurance. If that's true, it's not surprising that other countries don't have the same problem!

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

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Post by lrem » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 7:42 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #81

janekm wrote: post #58

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My first reaction was that it could be a recruitment drive of sorts to help build up their hardware team. Apple have been really smart in the last decade in buying up really good chip development teams and that is experience that is really hard to find.

Does Google have a silicon team?

What are TPUs and quantum computers made of? ;)

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

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Post by ladyanita22 » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 7:45 AM UTC

sixothree wrote: post #322

_bxg1 wrote: post #299

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> Nice thing to do I don't believe Google does anything because it's a "nice thing to do". There's some angle here. The angle could just be spurring general innovation in this area, which they'll benefit from indirectly down the line, but in one way or another this plays to their interests.

Google has never created a product that does not collect data in a unique manner apart from its other products.

They must be some kind of genius. I don't see how are they going to be able to extract personal information out of here.

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

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Post by pas » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:19 AM UTC

pradn wrote: post #242

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…

Classical economics thinks of people as "rational utility-maximizing actors", which doesn't approximate reality in quite a lot of ways. There's been a move toward more sophisticated models - like that people minimize regret more than they seek the optimal reward ("rational actors with regret minimization.") This switch to more complex underlying models is similar to computational models used in computer science. Algo…

The problem with the "rational agent" model is that it's a tautology. Yes sure everyone wants more utility, great, but everyone's utility function is slightly different. As you say some are risk takers pursuing insane rewards/yields/profits with low probability, while others are super risk-averse conservative in their choices, etc.

That said, economics doesn't rest on this. Macroeconomics doesn't care, nor micro/labor/health/sports/developmental econ either.

Sure trying to predict how someone (and more interestingly how groups) will behave based on their psych profile is an important area of research, but the aforementioned subfields of econ already have well working assumptions about how people will behave in the aggregate, even if they can't derive it from some exact utility function.

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

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Post by wallacoloo » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:28 AM UTC

patwillson22 wrote: post #280

My advice to anyone who's looking for a pathway into open source silicon is to look into E-Beam lithography. Effectively E-Beam lithography involves using a scanning electron microscope to expose a resist on silicon. This process is normally considered to slow for industrial production but it's simplicity and size make it ideal for prototyping and photo mask production. The simplistic explanation for why this works i…

As far as democratizing hardware goes, I wonder if silicon is the wrong place to start.

Decades ago computers used magnetic core memory. Those things operate on a macroscopic/classical physics level. You can make a core memory by hand if you buy the ferrous toroid first. But moreover, you mention 3d printers — it’s probably possible to manufacture the toroid on a sub-10k machine these days, be it a 3d printer or CNC machine. Some of these techniques generalize to multiple materials, meaning you could automate both the manufacturing of the toroid and the wires connecting them (and the assembly) and have an actual open-source, easily fabricated memory.

One thing not a lot of people know is that you can create clock-triggered combinatorial logic out of core memories just by routing the wires differently. So you’ve got your whole computation + volatile memory + non-volatile memory built on the same process using just two materials and at a macroscopic scale (think: millimeters). That sounds easier to bring up than silicon.

Yeah, macro-scale has its limitations (speed; power draw!), but it’s still enough to enable plenty of applications, and with room to scale it as the tech gets better.

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

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Post by jacquesm » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:42 AM UTC

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…

There is no historical precedent other than the media industry, which uses the copyright system for an entirely different purpose: to milk as much as possible out of a single investment in time and effort, usually by someone else than the original creator.

The whole thing revolves around the marginal cost of an extra copy of a piece of software being close to zero, no other critical industry gets such economies of scale. Making more chips still requires huge capex and opex.

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

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Post by jacquesm » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:43 AM UTC

HansHamster wrote: post #334

nwallin wrote: post #268

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> but let's not forget the non-material nature of software allows this, hardware will always be a physical (material) artifact. Sort of? I tried to get into FPGA programming a while ago, and it turns out the entire software stack to get from an idea in my brain to a blinking LED on a dev board is hot garbage. First of all, it's insanely expensive, and second of all, it really, really sucks. Like how is it (I forgot w…

Check out IceStorm (+Yosys, nextpnr...) for a pretty complete open source toolchain for ice40 FPGAs. It's really amazing to go from the infuriating to use vendor tools with all their quirks and bugs to a single 'make' that just generates the bitfile without using the broken IDE or complaining about licenses... The FPGAs are also relatively inexpensive ( The tools should also support the more powerful ECP5 FPGAs, but…

Interesting, thank you for the pointer. I've been playing around with FPGAs a bit and this sounds like it might just be what I was looking for. Is there any starter board that you'd recommend for this workflow?