Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

fossi-foundation.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 404 posts

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

#141

Post by ethbro »

baybal2 wrote: post #124
janekm wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. They can outsource silicon development. Should not be a problem with their money. In comparison to dotcom development teams, semi engineering teams are super cheap. In Taiwan, a good microelectronics PhD starting salary is USD $50k-60k...

Opportunity cost, though.

Experienced teams who have designed high performance microarchitectures aren't common, because there just isn't that much of that work done.

And when you're eventually going to spend $$$$ on the entire process, even a 1% optimization on the front end (or more importantly, a reduction of failure risk from experience!) is invaluable.

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

#143

Post by cottonseed »

dTal wrote: post #25

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

Google wants to create an open, innovative ecosystem for silicon so it will be easier for them to build accelerators for their workloads to meet the growing demand for compute. TPU is only one example of the kind of accelerators they want to build. Tim directly addresses this in the talk: https://youtu.be/EczW2IWdnOM?t=407.

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

#144

Post by nihil75 »

xvilka wrote: post #95

I should note there's open source ASIC toolchain - OpenROAD[1][2]. I wonder if these can be integrated. You also can use SymbiFlow to run your prototype in FPGA[3][4]. [1] https://theopenroadproject.org/ [2] https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project/OpenROAD [3] https://symbiflow.github.io/ [4] https://github.com/SymbiFlow

Spot on. Both are discussed by Tim in the video as part of the solution stack.

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

#145

Post by microtherion »

rasz wrote: post #65
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.

130nm was good enough for 2GHz 30W CPUs back in the day. We are talking almost decoding 1080@30 h264 in software performance.

I suspect, however, that the gap between designs that are realizable for amateurs with limited training, and the ones that are realizable for professional teams is wider than in software.

So somebody like me, who did two standard cell based ASICs 25 years ago, probably would have to add a sizable safety margin to produce a reliable chip, and would achieve nowhere near the performance of a pro team at the time.

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

#146

Post by imtringued »

pjc50 wrote: post #79
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..

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.

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

#148

Post by H_Pylori »

baybal2 wrote: post #123
madengr wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought most EDA companies put a stop to that with geographic licensing restrictions.

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,…

>A number of quite reputable SoC brands here in the PRD are known to be based on 100% pirated EDAs.

Not cool man, not cool.

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

#149

Post by kingosticks »

> All open source chip designs qualify, no further strings attached!

Surely they have some threshold requirements that the thing actually works? How is this going to work? I mean, if there's no investment required from me, what's the incentive for me to verify my design properly? What's the point in them fabbing a load of fatally bugged open-source designs?

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

#150

Post by dekhn »

navanchauhan wrote: post #33
riffraff wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, but it depends on the program, that's what the whole ASIC industry for bitcoin mining is.

I was thinking about AutoDock Vina ( Molecular Docking Software ), I have literally 0 knowledege about hardware :( Then again, this is going to be a really fun experience

Yes, you can build dedicated ASICs. No, it's not worth it for docking software.
Post reply on HN