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Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

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

#381

Post by zhengyi13 »

38e7ruhrhdh wrote: post #314
koheripbal wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If anything economics seems like the smarter field when compared to the open source community because the focus is on resource evaluation, allocation, and returns. Open source could probably use more talent but the missing lynchpin is obviously a reward structure. The techno-optimism of the 80s and 90s doesn't scale, we need licensing structures that entitle the parties doing the unprofitable stuff to a share of the…

If you think there's no reward structure, perhaps it's because you can't see it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy

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

#382

Post by jiveturkey »

riking wrote: post #352
jiveturkey wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

and then you're going to do a secondary saw operation? $$$

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

#383

Post by rudedogg »

ajb wrote: 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…

- You get somewhere around ~100-400 chips, TBD later

- Each shuttle run will accept 40 projects, if more than that apply a selection process will be used. A lottery was mentioned as a possibility.

- First shuttle run this November

Like you mention everything is just planned at this point, but the speaker said these were roughly their goals.

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

#384

Post by wizzwizz4 »

stock_toaster wrote: post #311
Taek wrote: post #151

I've spent some time in the chip industry. It is awful, backwards, and super far behind. I didn't appreciate the full power of open source until I saw an industry that operates without it. Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k. Also, it's an absolutely terrible linter by software standards. In software, linters combine the best ideas from thousands of engineers across dozens of companies building on…

It’s interesting to consider this from a finance standpoint too. Consider/compare/contrast with open source software ecosystems where large amounts of money that large companies are able to effectively “strip mine” from the ecosystem. Hopefully there is a middle ground somewhere, where the folks working on open source software can get compensated for their work so as to enable a healthier system overall, so we aren't…

License your work under the AGPL, and they can't do that – at least, without arranging another license with you.

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

#385

Post by mlindner »

pas wrote: post #357
pradn wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/labo…

> 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.

There's nothing in the rational agent model that assumes that everyone has the same definition of utility function. Different people want different things.

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

#386

Post by jiveturkey »

neltnerb wrote: post #345
jiveturkey wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

If the fab isn't that expensive, all the more reason to learn how to do it proficiently for free, no? Even if it doesn't get produced it seems like a good learning project.

absolutely! but that already existed. (free tools that don't result in something that can be fabbed)

what you would get out of this is access to a google-promoted open source PDK. It's specific to SkyWater so "open source" don't mean a whole lot, not today anyway. The available libraries are very immature. It's clearly a nice promotion for SkyWater, one I am enthusiastic about, but nonetheless not the shimmering beacon you're looking for.

You already know this: time is your most precious commodity. Don't bumble your way through a thinly disguised and immature FOSS offering. Cadence Virtuoso online training is just $3k per seat per year[1]. That said, I'm completely talking out of my rear. I've no idea if the training is actually useful without having a license for Virtuoso, where the webs say license costs are 6 figures per seat. I'd enroll in a university program to get access ... [2]

I just suggest this based on your stated goals, to be able to have enough proficiency to use professionally. Certainly you don't need 10,000 hours, and some of that is amortized by related experience, but time is your #1 enemy here, not money. Any money you can spend to jumpstart things is money well spent. OTOH if you just want to enjoy exploring IC design in a noncommittal hobbyist way, as a learning "experience" ala MasterClass, then this project does seem an excellent starting point.

SkyWater is a "trusted foundry", whatever that means, apparently completely US-based. Therefore, I think the most valuable thing that could ultimately (say 5 years hence) come out of this would be for OpenTitan to be "ported" to ASIC and to the SkyWater process. 130nm is large but for this application, for IoT in general, for anything not a mobile handset, it would be powerful. Imagine a Raptor TALOS workstation with an OpenTitan RoT! Or, your own design PCIe card with your own fabbed and X-Ray verifiable RoT. Powerful.

[1] https://www.cadence.com/content/dam/cadence-www/global/en_US... (slides 3 and 4)

[2] https://www.cadence.com/en_US/home/company/cadence-academic-...

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

#387

Post by grandmczeb »

cottonseed wrote: post #130
ohazi wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You generally don't do small runs of chips, unless cost is no object. The NRE costs of getting the masks made, even on older processes like these are still comfortably in the $X00,000 range, blowing past $1 million pretty quickly if you need a process that isn't ancient. That's without design software licenses, which can be hundreds of thousands more. So the minimum order quantity usually needs to be at least in the…

efabless already runs the shuttle service that Google and efabless are going to fund here. From the efabless home page: > $70K, 20 WEEKS, 100 SAMPLES Note quite $50K, but close.

Skywater (the actual fab Google is using for this program) also runs their own shuttle program[1]. The cost isn't public, but it's reportedly in the range of 40-50k.

[1] https://www.skywatertechnology.com/mpw-fastshuttle/

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

#388

Post by sangnoir »

_bxg1 wrote: post #299
Nokinside wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are not related at all. Only common element is making silicon. Apple spends $100+ millions to design high performance microarchitecture to high-end process for their own products. Google gives tiny amount of help to hobbyists so that they can make chips for legacy nodes. Nice thing to do, nothing to do with Apple SoC. --- Software people in HN constantly confuse two completely different things (1) Optimized hig…

> 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.

> I don't believe Google does anything because it's a "nice thing to do".

If only Google had this singular focus... From my external (and lay) observation - some Google departments will indulge senior engineers and let them work on their pet projects, even when the projects are only tangentially related to current focus areas.

Looking at Google org on Github (https://github.com/google); it might be a failure of imagination on my part, but I fail to see an "angle" on a good chunk of them.

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

#390

Post by hajile »

pizza234 wrote: post #367
UncleOxidant wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also worked on the hardware side a bit as well as in EDA (Electronic Design Automation)- the software used to design hardware. Since you already commented on the hardware side of things, I'll comment on the EDA side. The EDA industry is also very backwards and highly insular - it felt like an old boys club. When I worked in EDA in the late aughts we were still using a version of gcc from about 2000. They did not…

> did run Linux it was also a very ancient version of RedHat - about 4 years behind How is a 4 years old distribution "very ancient"? There's very likely plenty of Ubuntu 16.04 in the field, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. RedHat uses "old" kernels, if that's what you refer to with "ancient" but there are reasons for that, and they're also backported, they're not unupdated.

4 year old RHL is more like 8 years old for the rest of us. Stability above everything else has its price.
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