For open source chip design and manufacturing, the Open MPW project created by Google, SkyWater and Efabless is naturally the most popular. The plan utilizes SkyWater’s 130nm process and has helped many open source chip designs to achieve tapeout. Such a completely free plan can be said to be a boon to the semiconductor open source community, and now this plan will usher in a bigger upgrade.
From 130nm to 90nm On July 28, Google officially announced the expansion of its partnership with SkyWater. It is expected to launch a new open source SDK, SKY90-FD, corresponding to SkyWater’s 90nm FDSOI CMOS process this year. This is big news for open source chip design. You must know that the density increase from 130nm to 90nm is quite considerable. Although it is not used for mass production, it is enough to verify some mature chip design solutions. , At present, many automotive and consumer chips are still using this level of technology.
And the opening of the 90nm process node has another meaning, that is, SkyWater has invested almost all of its manufacturing technology into the open source community. Although SkyWater also has a 65nm process, it has just passed the certification and has not entered mass production. state. Designers who have tapped out on the 130nm process before can also try new process nodes, optimize the original design, and analyze the PPA differences between different designs and nodes.
So far, the Open MPW tape-out plan based on the 130nm process has been carried out for six phases. A total of 364 projects have been submitted by the open source community, and 240 designs have been successfully tape-out. Google has also made statistics on these projects. The designers participating in the plan are from different countries, most of them are from Turkey, Pakistan, India, Japan and the United Kingdom. It can be seen that international relations have no impact on the design and manufacture of open source chips. In the future, we may also see open-source chip projects designed by China.
Follow the chip bill for soup? Although the $13 million investment is nothing compared to the $50 billion subsidy of the Chip Act, it is not a plan to enhance the competitiveness of the country’s semiconductor manufacturing after all, and the US government is not willing to pay more. You must know that although the chip bill aims to enhance the chip manufacturing capacity in the United States, the implementation of the object makes many semiconductor companies feel unfair. The biggest beneficiaries of the chip bill are IDM manufacturers such as Intel, Texas Instruments, and Micron, especially Intel, which is rumored to receive $20 billion, while Fabless companies such as Qualcomm, Nvidia, and AMD can be said to have no share at all.
On the day of the official passage of the chip bill, SkyWater also publicly expressed its gratitude, so it seems that they can also benefit from it, but the subsidies obtained should not be comparable to several other larger IDM companies. If you don’t know the details, it’s hard not to let people imagine that SkyWater is willing to open up its most advanced technology for open source chip development, and it’s even free. Could it be because of funding from the Chip Act? In fact, it is not. The previous several tape-out plans were actually paid by Google, and this time Google is no longer the funder, but the US Department of Defense contributed 15 million US dollars.
So why is the US Department of Defense willing to pay out of its own pocket to support the manufacture of open source chips? The answer, of course, is that they can benefit from it. In the US Department of Defense’s view, because the commercial software they use must be guaranteed, or come with source code, the supplier or themselves can maintain it.
But because of this, there are not many commercial companies willing to make commitments or contribute source code, and the Department of Defense itself has begun to use a lot of open source software. After all, open source code is open and transparent, and it is easy to pass the review of design flaws and malicious code. . Open source hardware designs can also be directly misappropriated, not to mention that some defense-related semiconductors do not use advanced technology, otherwise the US defense microelectronics department will not choose SkyWater as a supplier.