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Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

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Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#31

Post by crote »

bunnie wrote: post #12
bArray wrote: post #8

> Those with a bit of silicon savvy would note that it’s not cheap to produce such a chip, yet, I have not raised a dollar of venture capital. I’m also not independently wealthy. So how is this possible? What kind of order of magnitude of cost are we talking about? What are the next steps - is there some service to cut the wafer and put into a package for you?

The masks alone are single digit millions, but with all the design tools and staff costs typically tens of millions is the benchmark number for a tape out in this node. After coming out of the fab, the chips go through probing, packaging and reeling.

Can you share something about the subsequent per-chip manufacturing costs?

Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#32

Post by crote »

arj wrote: post #20

It seems it had hardware support for secure mesh. Anyone know what that is?

With the right equipment it is possible to probe the inside of a chip, allowing an attacker to measure or even alter internal signals down to the transistor level. Expensive, but very useful if it lets you extract a crucial shared secret.

The traditional defense against this kind of invasive attack is to put a grid of sense wires on the outermost metal layer, and measuring whether it has been tampered with: you can't get to the important bits without cutting through the security grid, but any kind of modification to the security grid triggers a self-destruct.

Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#33

Post by anilakar »

genxy wrote: post #25

To anyone from crowdsupply listening, please turn down your VPN check. I am not stripping my privacy protection to use your site. *edit, Crowdsupply does a full block on multiple VPN providers. There is no way to access their site without turning off your VPN.

You do realize that violating export regulations is a much bigger risk than losing a few individuals relying on snake oil security?

Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#34

Post by duffmancd »

vintagedave wrote: post #26

This is wonderful! Also what a fantastic partnership that allowed adding a new CPU to that die. Kudos to them. I had a lot of trouble finding out which open source license applies. Wikipedia’s RISC-V page doesn’t seem to say; its citation for being released under open source doesn’t seem to say which one either.[0] Could be wrong. Exhausted after working all day. But it’s not front and center… On the RISC-V site I th…

RISC-V is a family of instruction sets (which have various chips implementing them). Think "X86-64". It looks like the baochip-1x is using the VexRiscv CPU. The HDL is available here under MIT: https://github.com/SpinalHDL/VexRiscv

Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#36

Post by genxy »

anilakar wrote: post #33
genxy wrote: post #25

To anyone from crowdsupply listening, please turn down your VPN check. I am not stripping my privacy protection to use your site. *edit, Crowdsupply does a full block on multiple VPN providers. There is no way to access their site without turning off your VPN.

You do realize that violating export regulations is a much bigger risk than losing a few individuals relying on snake oil security?

Digikey and Mouser do not do this.

> few individuals relying on snake oil security

Please don't.

Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#38

Post by lejalv »

anilakar wrote: post #33
genxy wrote: post #25

To anyone from crowdsupply listening, please turn down your VPN check. I am not stripping my privacy protection to use your site. *edit, Crowdsupply does a full block on multiple VPN providers. There is no way to access their site without turning off your VPN.

You do realize that violating export regulations is a much bigger risk than losing a few individuals relying on snake oil security?

Can you explain what is the connection between closing the site to VPN users and violating export regulations?

Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#39

Post by stavros »

Wait a minute, why can't I reply to bunnie's top-level comment? Anyway, here's what I wanted to say:

Adding your CPU to another company's silicon is a genius move, well done. I wonder why companies don't sell their spare die space to others, is it because of trust/risk?

Re: Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

#40

Post by shrubble »

anilakar wrote: post #33
genxy wrote: post #25

To anyone from crowdsupply listening, please turn down your VPN check. I am not stripping my privacy protection to use your site. *edit, Crowdsupply does a full block on multiple VPN providers. There is no way to access their site without turning off your VPN.

You do realize that violating export regulations is a much bigger risk than losing a few individuals relying on snake oil security?

Wouldn’t it require making a purchase and providing a shipping address? How would a VPN get in the middle of checking the physical address?
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