Interesting, 130nm was achieved by Pentium III as a reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/130_nm_process
Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
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Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
#212So, 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.
Well since you evidently did have time to watch the talk, perhaps you also have time to enlighten us about these questions. If not, maybe don't criticise those of us who used at least some of our time to dig out some information for the thread.
Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
#213Earlier 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…
To me, it seems as less of a sociological anomaly and more of an example of the quality of production outside the established competitive norms of capitalism. There are multiple such examples throughout history. The gift economy wasn't born with FOSS development.
There is a lot of literature on the subject of cooperation, especially from anarchist philosophers (i.e. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Kropotkin).
Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
#214Any 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…
Gracias.
Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Wholeheartedly agree. In parts of society where our distorted ideas of "productivity" and "success" are absent, people share more freely. The island where my family is from comes to mind (Crete, Greece). There—in the rural areas—people were able to deal with the 2007-2008 crisis a lot more effectively than they did in the cities—esp. compared to Athens. What I observed is that if someone didn't have enough, the rest of the village would provide. There was a general understanding that that way the people with less would get back on their feet and help contribute to the overall pool.
Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
#216Earlier 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.)
Agreed - partnerships abound in the real business world. It might be under-modeled in economic theory and not well taught in business school, but the value of networking is and having high-level industry relationships is the life-blood of a good business leader - specifically because of partnering and information sharing.
Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
#217From 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…
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 histories of questionable practices including ignoring copyrights, distributing infringing software, deleting critical posts from their forums and putting out misleading information.
Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I think the truth is in the middle: there are many examples of secret processes throughout history and craftsmen jealously guarding processes except through apprenticeship programs where payment was years of cheap labor.
Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
#219From 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…
You would have problems with licensing the 68k ISA. I believe freescale currently owns the architecture, and still manufactures some 68k microcontroller cores.
> I believe freescale currently owns the architecture,
Owns it how? 68060-- the last of 68k's designs-- was released in 1994. Any patents should now be expired.
Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
#220My 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?
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