[FOSSi Dial-Up] Tim Ansell - Skywater PDK: Fully open source manufacturable PDK for a 130nm process
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters point to it for Google's reasons for backing open silicon and for background on the open-source chip design workflow.
What it is
Tim Ansell presents the SkyWater PDK, a fully open source manufacturable process development kit for a 130nm process, as the first FOSSi Dial-Up talk. He covers its role in a fully open chip design flow.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2020 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends panick21_ · 2024-10 · on “RISC-V is currently slow compared to modern CPUs”
> The architecture doesn't offer anything actually new to the industry. There is more to live then technical specification. The change in the license and the development pattern and the business model does actually matter. I suggest you watch some talks by Krste Asanovic who created the RISC-V project, he explained exactly this point. > Open source software is unreasonably effective because of that trivial marginal cost of reproduction. Its open hardware isn't as good as open software. Yes we know. Sadly we don't have a universal 3d printer. But that doesn't mean its worthless. > Unlike the Linux kernel you can't compile a CPU core and reboot and get some performance gain. Have you never use
Cites cottonseed · 2020-07 · on “Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips”
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: [this video] .
Cites nickik · 2020-11 · on “What is a System-on-Chip (SoC), and why do we care if they are open source?”
Google, FOSSi and eFabless are working on a 100% open source chip design workflow that would allow you to use only open source tools to create a chip, and thanks to other efforts open source chips and ISA exist already: See: [this video]
Cites KenoFischer · 2020-12 · on “Google partners with SkyWater to enable open source manufacturing of ASICs”
It was talked about all over the place. E.g. see [this video] from June around the one hour mark. As I said, I'm very far from an insider.
Cites nickik · 2021-07 · on “Libre-SoC 180nm Power ISA v3.0 ASIC Submitted to IMEC MPW”
Google has done a lot of effort in that direction. The first ever chips have already been produced that are fully open source from the tools used to make to the complete tool chain need to manufacture them. There is a huge amount of great stuff going on this this area. Tim Ansell - Skywater PDK: Fully open source manufacturable PDK for a 130nm process [this video]
Critical octoberfranklin · 2020-12 · on “Google partners with SkyWater to enable open source manufacturing of ASICs”
> It was talked about all over the place. Really? Where can we read about it? > E.g. see [this video] from June around the one hour mark. What are you referring to, where exactly in there? I poked "around the one hour mark" and didn't stumble across it, but am not gonna watch the whole thing. It's over an hour of somebody talking at a camera. Does an offhand comment buried in the middle of a 90-minute youtube ramble really strike you as appropriate notification of such an important requirement? Especially when this requirement doesn't appear anyplace where it can be read ?