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Comment by turbinerneiter | Hacker News Reader

I think that the patent threat will crumble with more and more complex features being implemented on the Open Source cores, like BOOM and so on. I don't think that ideas that are taught commonly at university and are all over GitHub will be able to stay "owned".

The question than will be how close we can come to the proprietary systems and which use-cases are low-key enough that their cutting edge new innovations don't make a difference.

I think the microcontroller space will be wholly owned by RISC-V in the long run. For cheap, commoditized stuff, open is better than closed for everyone. For the high performance stuff, the manufacturer still needs to protect their investment, especially because the will need to invest more and more for ever smaller gains.

Do you think that makes sense or am I phantasizing? :D

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Someone eventually has to build the hardware and that's the really expensive part. Arm has the upper hand here as they deliver more than just an ISA, they can sell you a whole silicon and software stack including engineering expertise to help get your thing to market. Plus they control the ecosystem so you're not going to run into odd edge cases (e.g. Loongson which is sorta MIPS). Not saying that companies like SiFive are not competent but they are just one player in what will become a very big game.

Do you think that fabs like TMSC or global foundries will develop tools to support IP designers with this, to drive their own business?

There is stuff like that going on in PCB design, where manufacturers make free design software, or distributors making footprint libraries.

> There is stuff like that going on in PCB design, where manufacturers make free design software, or distributors making footprint libraries.

Totally different things. Asking TMSC how to design a RISC-V chip is akin to asking Advanced Circuits or OSH Park how to design an Intel motherboard. They can make the board for you, but they dont design it.

It's not about asking them how to design a chip, it's about them providing the tools needed to go from a Verliog design to something they can manufacture.

So I would say to that extent they do, the foundries provide dev kits with cells to use on their process, and there's definitely the same incentive, good reusable IP gets you products faster which gets them more business. I think a lot of the landscape is just driven by the sheer cost of getting it wrong. Spinning a pcb is a bummer. Needing a new mask set is so much worse.

There is eFabless, among other efforts in the vein you describe, they do a multi project wafer shuttle thing that google sponsors using skywater. It's supposedly an open source PDK, I haven't used it.

https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk

> they can make the board for you, but they dont design it.

TSMC is a manufacturer, but they still have a whole IP/Parts library that they share with their customers.

> TSMC's Design Service Alliance partners provide industry-leading, silicon-verified libraries, IP and design services directly to designers in fabless semiconductor companies, IDMs and systems houses. DSA partners provide best-of-class, silicon-verified libraries; high-performance, leading-edge intellectual property cores; unprecedented accuracy in design simulation, validation and verification; faster cycle time from specification through tapeout to finished wafers; and access to experienced designers and developers of complex functions.

https://pr.tsmc.com/english/news/2211 (year: 2000)

Absolutely agree with GP on microcontroller. I mean it is practically everywhere now, from Video Encoding / Decoding Engine to within GPU.

And that cost is exactly why it makes Zero sense the mainstream view on internet and HN that SiFive or RISC-V is going to crush ARM on Server / Desktop / Smartphone computing. Despite repeatedly asking what are the competitive advantage. Of course China betting everything on RISCV is a different story.

And this submission only have 52 upvote with very little comments. i.e It will never reach mainstream thoughts. Although I dont think any of the RISC-V Evangelism Strikeforce would want to hear them anyway.

> "For cheap, commoditized stuff, open is better than closed for everyone."

Having an open core is only half the battle. Cheap, commoditized stuff is tuned and tweaked to within an inch of its life for the available foundries and specific processes on which it is being fabbed both to squeeze out maximum yield and to give the highest possible performance at minimum power. That's very expensive engineering for which investors are going to want to earn their money back on.

I think for the high-performance stuff, history will repeat itself like with China's silk production. The "silkworms" (today's silicon IP) will eventually become open and everyone will know how China did it.

China’s silk industry attempted to prevent replication by withholding information: in today’s lingo, that’s not patents, that’s trade secrets. Those are intentionally mutually exclusive: the motivation for patents was quite literally to prevent knowledge being kept secret and eventually lost by granting time-limited exclusivity in exchange for public disclosure. (That’s why you can’t get a patent for something that was previously published elsewhere, even if it was you publishing it.)

In theory, every patented technique is already public: it’s described by the text of the patent. In practice, today’s patents are malicious compliance writ large: most of the time, they describe only the most indispensable (not necessarily the most difficult) parts of the processes in the most obtuse language possible. And while I hold that a patent lawyer’s job is morally repugnant, the overall fault is hardly with those exploiting loopholes, it’s with those who cast the loopholes in stone (making them part of national law, pervasive international agreement bundles such as the WTO, etc.) in the first place.

For high performance, HW accelerators would gain traction as that would allow them to protect the IP and provide differentiation.

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