Libre-SoC 180nm Power ISA v3.0 ASIC Submitted to IMEC MPW

thanks :)

yehyeh, or you bought a winmodem over 15 years ago, someone told you "hey you have to upgrade to windows 10", it downloads over your 56k Dialup winmodem, reboots... and... no drivers. yes this really happens: ThinkPenguin stock TTYACM USB modems and their biggest customers are Rural people in the USA who are too far out to get broadband!

LIP6 does actually have a fully NDA-free silicon-proven Cell Library, called nsxlib, it's been used in 360nm and 180nm, the 180nm was done by a Japanese University. i think i may have mentioned this already, it's a small town with a 2(?) micron foundry, they make it available to people anywhere in the world entirely for free, it's for training the employees of the town, because it's so old and basic it's hard to mess it up. so they want people to submit designs that the trainees can learn how to fab, before they move on to the more expensive equipment.

but, really, use Chips4Makers, he has 360nm available, EUR 1750 for 20 MPW chips in QFP, i believe.

Use them where, exactly?

Your comment glosses over a ton of critical details.

The most important of them being that even on such an old technology generation (180nm-110nm) no two fabs are so compatible that you can send a GDS designed for one of them to the other unless (a) one of them licensed their process from the other, like IBM/GloFo/Samsung back in the 2010s or (b) you planned for this in advance and designed a custom "least common denominator" process (like MOSIS SCMOS) to target which means making very large performance sacrifices. The (b) approach is much harder than it looks; I know of no examples other than MOSIS SCMOS, and in spite of being the pioneer experts at doing this they had a hard time at 180nm and failed on the following (90nm) generation.

The other, lesser, problem is that no foundry will let you even submit a GDS without signing their NDA. Even if you swear to them that you don't need their design rules for some reason. They don't care. NDA or no chips, not up for discussion. In fact, technically SkyWater still works this way -- to avoid the NDA you must submit through eFabless, not directly to the foundry (maybe this will change someday) and eFabless signed their NDA, then (obviously) negotiated a waiver. So saying "you can work around this problem that the only no-NDA foundry has by just going to another foundry" because there are no other no-NDA foundries, nor are there any on the horizon.

Rust supports powerpc64le-unknown-linux-gnu, it is in-fact what we used to test a lot of POWER9's instructions to replicate the exact results that POWER9 gives, since the ISA spec doesn't specify the results for a lot of cases.

https://git.libre-soc.org/?p=power-instruction-analyzer.git;...

> Also, as your webpage states, you signed TSMC's NDA:

FALSE. again. i do not work for LIP6. i do not work for Chips4Makers. i am an independent *LIBRE* Developer. i have NEVVERRRR signed a Foundry NDA and, having a background involving security analysis and Reverse-Engineering, it would be suicidally and monumentally stupid and counter-productive for me, personally, to do so.

please try to not conflate matters (twice in succession) that you haven't checked or read properly. the best thing to do is to ask questions, such as:

"You're a Libre Project. that has significant implications that everything is entirely Libre. I notice however that you say that someone signed a Foundry NDA? what impact did this have for you? did it stop you from releasing any source code as per obligations of LIBRE Licenses?"

and then i can answer positively and in a friendly way rather than having to publicly waste both my time and that of readers in first unpicking the mistakes, embarrassing you in the process (which risks a public confrontation that annoys everybody even more), and it all goes to hell pretty quickly after that.

answering the question above that you didn't ask: as you know there are about five layers of NDAs in the Silicon Industry.

we've managed to bust through three of those, and so have managed - as a LIBRE Team - to fulfil our obligations both to our funding body, NLnet, under their Privacy and Enhanced Trust Programme, and to Libre/Open Hardware developers by releasing all HDL under LGPLv3 Licenses

     https://git.libre-soc.org

and using Libre-Licensed VLSI tools

and using Libre-Licensed Cell Libraries

now, the TEAM THAT DEVELOPED the VLSI tool - signed a TSMC NDA.

      NOBODY ON THE LIBRE-SOC TEAM SIGNED THAT NDA.

also, Chips4Makers - the developers of FlexLib - signed a TSMC NDA

      CHIPS4MAKERS != Libre-SOC

we are three separate and INDEPENDENT teams, working together, to tackle an insane situation, at different levels. i'll say it again:

      LIBRE-SOC HAS NOT SIGNED AAAANNNYYYYY FOUNDRY NDAs.

are we clear about that, now?

there happens also to be another team, Libre-Silicon, also funded by NLnet, who are developing an actual Libre VLSI process and actually developing a mini home-grown Fab.

then there is another NLnet-sponsored project, working with the Libre Silicon team, to develop another Libre-Licensed Standard Cell Library, that is targetted at Libre-Silicon's PDK (when it's available)

  https://nlnet.nl/project/LibreSiliconStandardCellLibrary/

however neither of these are ready, so we went with the pragmatic route, after exhausting all other options: the parallel track.