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Comment by Cyph0n | Hacker News Reader

> The chip design itself should be the secret sauce. Not the tools you make the chip with.

I’m sure Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor would love to hear more about this.

Everyone keeps hammering home how much of the process is proprietary. Whose interest is that in though? Is it in Nvidias & Intels & Qualcomm's interest to let these chip design software companies have extremely proprietary cake, that no one can advance or enhance, that has no machine-learning capabilities surrounding it?

To me it feels like so many are missing the picture here. Chip designers ought to cooperate on tooling, to burst exactly this batch of crooks you've just cited's game. Designers should stop being held back by limited, small minded, heavily controlled proprietary software, & collaborate on making a better tooled world we can all openly advance.

Some day I hope we have similar overthrows of ASML & other layers of the stack, as what's happening in chip design now (for basically everyone except nvidia and apple, the two behemoths). Competition & cooperation mixing at various levels is good, is healthy, keeps the world from ossifying.

Edit: oh look, a comment full of these same proprietary chip-design-software companies (not chip-designers) trying to make ML software! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31092673

Let the tooling classes tremble at an open source revolution. The chip designers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

Fabbing Folks of All Countries, Unite!

The skills needed to create a chip and the skills needed to create chip design software are fundamentally different. Of all the engineers I've met who work on the physical implementation and timing closure of digital chips, only a very limited number would have any hope of creating some sort of place and route tool, and it would be rudimentary and inefficient. They are not expert programmers.

Huge part of why OpenROAD (and as this article.indicates, nvidia) are so focused on machine learning! Because the nitty gritty of chip design has abundant gnarly problems requiring deep deep expertise. Deploying software engineers is hard. But building ml is kind of our bag!

There's another nice upstart opensource project with even fancier ml placememt systems that spawned recently out of the openroad world, dreamplace, https://github.com/limbo018/DREAMPlace

This is just gonna get more & more biased against a couple super smart engineers who we've deeply entrusted to divine inner the workings of the chips on, & become increasingly a set of better modelled problems that we can machine learningly optimize.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com