Time to open source the chip making industry... ... ...
This whole fabrication thing is a biiig chokepoint.
This whole fabrication thing is a biiig chokepoint.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_War:_The_Fight_for_the_...
Open sourcing software works because some many people already have the hardware (a computer)
The cost of the subscriptions to the design tools provided by Cadence, Synopsis, Siemens (Mentor) and a few others is ridiculously high and it can contribute with many millions of $ to the design cost of a state-of-the-art chip.
The design tools themselves have been improved extremely slowly and they are of a quite low quality for so expensive professional tools. In an open-source environment it would be easy to make much better alternatives.
The reason that only a few timid attempts exist to provide alternatives for only some parts of a complete toolchain, is that the semiconductor manufacturers, like TSMC, do not provide public information about the exact data that they need as input for manufacturing, about the design rules that must be implemented for valid designs and about the characteristics of their processes that must be known for simulations.
All this information is available only to big companies like Synopsis, Cadence etc. and this perpetuates their monopoly and their ability of extracting huge amounts of money with minimal software development work, from all the companies that design ICs.
While the companies that design ICs are not happy for this huge rent that they pay for the design tools, they are also extremely risk-averse and they do not want to make any change in their design workflows, no matter how small, that might increase the risks of failure in a designed chip. Because of this there are no chances of replacing the incumbents with open-source tools, at least not in the big established companies that design chips.
There are FOSS IC design tools but nothing that can match Synopsis, Mentor and Cadence and the semi industry isn't gonna start dealing with FOSS jank and destroy their productivity and competitiveness just to save a few milion in licensing costs to those 3 companies, which are peanuts in the end.
They're like the John Deer of semi tools, expensive to own and run, but necessary to be competitive and get the most out of this field.
Plus, the proprietary stuff is still the standard-cell libraries of TSMC, Samsung, Glo-Fo etc. They will never open source this.
>and this perpetuates their monopoly and their ability of extracting huge amounts of money with minimal software development work,
Oh, you mean just like Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc?
Because they sell ads and monetize their users instead, which is a pipe of infinite money.
Why does it matter to you how much they're charging? It's not communism. It's their honest labor and they're allowed to charge as much as they want for it, same how you're allowed to ask for as much money as you want for your salary negotiations.
So please excuse traditional engineering companies for trying to make a living by monetizing their hard earned IP like every single company out there, and not selling ads like big-tech.
The world still needs traditional engineering companies to exist to progress, we can't have a society where everyone only works by selling ads to one another.
If you feel like they're price gouging, then feel free to write your own EDA tools and sell them for cheap, I'm sure the market is open to paying much less and saving some money.
However most foundries, like too many other businesses today, are not interested in new customers, unless they already are very big companies, which is one of the factors that has resulted in the extraordinary reduction in the number of companies that compete in every field, in comparison with the situation from a couple of decades ago.
If you’re trying to draw parallels between this is and, say 3D printing, you will not find many similarities. PCB fabrication is also a a different beast but a lot of people think it’s as easy as finding a fab house that takes gerber files and creates a board for them.
If we want something that more closely resembles how we develop software, we probably will need to develop processes that enables us to flash FPGAs like MCUs, make them fully read only, and allow the customer to etch their own marking onto the chip. There facilities that produce ASICs like this already, but I can see something more standardized becoming more successful for general purpose. This does however require that we have a foundry create the original chips, the difference here is that they are producing the same standardized chip for everyone which would allow any foundry to make compatible alternatives.
This design is quite non-trivial even today. It took several of the brightest minds of all time to get it just right back then (like von Neumann).
Even with modern tools, you still need a team of quite capable engineers/scientists to pull something like that off, even if you do have the plutonium.
The little boy design is easier to engineer, but bomb grade uranium is even harder to produce than plutonium.
The machining bit so, uaing proper machinery, is easy. And the necessary engineers and technicians readily available.
What makes it easier, though, is that the general principle is relatively well known, so one could always brute force the solution using computer simulations, even if unable to do the math by hand.