Libre Silicon – Free semiconductors for everyone

> Am I reading that correctly? For $50 you get ~1,000 transistors worth of die space, and it comes in a package?

That's correct, although it's $100: $50 for the space on the group-run chip and $50 for the physical stuff: the chip and the dev kit.

> Are there any other limitations?

Yes. Although, fewer and fewer with each next iteration.

> Full-custom analog design if you wanted?

For analog design, you would need to deal with https://efabless.com/ directly, pay $10k and get 100 QFN chips back with your design some time later.

TinyTapeout is digital-only, for now.

The current tinytapeout 5 adds the first analog support, so I guess it's even a bit more experimental than normal.

Low IO count, and limited clock speed.

It's also unsuitable if you want to keep your design private. Basically, the way this works is that all the different designs are placed on a single chip, with address pins to connect your design to the io pins. This means that everyone participating will have access to all functionality. You essentially buy a single tile in a shared chip.

This is also why it can be done so cheaply. Making 500 copies of 1 chip is way easier than 1 copy each of 500 different chips.

No analog yet. Also it's a thousand gates, so more like a 4-digit transistor count. For a physical one you pay an extra 50$.

The physical capital requirements are never going away, so that's not going to happen.

The process is somewhat well understood, it's the implementation that has so many levels of perfect process and perfect components that makes tsmc a wonder of the world.

While it’s similar to the kinds of biological damage that radiation can cause, because the radiation induced damage in DNA does work similarly, the energy from a radiation “hit” breaks bonds in the DNA molecule and causes knock on effects just like in the silicon crystal structures and metalic wires…

The better biological analogy for the slow degradation of the integrated circuits due to radiation exposure would probably be heavy metal poisoning because the damage doesn’t typically spread or multiply like DNA damage and/or cancer does. Heavy metal poisoning “accumulates” it’s a slow buildup of something not meant to be there, which causes increasing problems with biological systems, until something is s disrupted by the heavy metal concentration giving a progression of symptoms until enough has built up and you get fatal symptoms.

Edit: Simple example/comparison

Everyone can (and we sadly have plenty of evidence for this) tolerate a fair bit of lead with an LD50 of 4500 to 5500 mg/kg or and a little bit of mercury with various mercury salts having an LD50 from 6-200 mg/kg, (LD50 is the abbreviation for "lethal dose, 50%", The LD50 for a substance is the dose required to kill half the members of a population.). Two heavy metals, two different levels of "exposure risks".

Similarly the metal & doped semiconductors of an integrated circuit have have different sensitives to different kinds of radiation damage. Metal interconnects will tolerate radiation differently than the silicon which is different again to the insulation substrate...

A Heavy ion, like a stray iron nucleus, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HZE_ion) is going to just dump a lot of energy and screw up a chunk of the atoms in the area around of whatever and wherever it hits, its like the mercury salts, you cant take a lot of hits like that, and fortunately they are statistically rare.

Higher energy protons, like cosmic ray protons, can cause proton induced transmutation which will slowly turn the atoms you want into the atoms you don't want, and can cause the silicon transistors themselves to change similar to how we can (and sometimes do) use neutrons to dope semiconductors in the first place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_(semiconductor)#Neutron...)

Lower energy protons, and high energy electrons and positrons, can also lead to a slow buildup of electrical charges which can cause dielectric breakdowns and other unwanted effects, which can depending on what is involved and how it happens the cause of intermittent or permanent effects.

Three different kinds of radiation, three different exposure disks. They are each like different "poisons", and the total exposure, the total absorbed dose of each of them accumulates over time... until one or more of them cause something critical to happen and render the hardware inoperable.

You simply can't use digital components in high radiation environments. In borderline cases you can implement fault tolerance. This is a big topic and simple explanations with analogies does nothing besides give an inaccurate picture. The type of radiation (the particle), the speed/energy of each particle, the rate of particles passing through your surface area over time, process node size, process topology, and the details of the circuits themselves all play important roles. In many scenarios where you expect errant bit flips but minimal long term damage. Errant bit flips often put circuits in a state that has no typical entry or exit, so the device latches up and needs a power cycle.

Yeah, our project is still ongoing, I'm just too busy for updating the website regularly.

gratis

Ah, sorry about that. I'm pretty uninformed on the China-HK-Taiwan geopoli. I assumed by communist they were referring to the USSR flag.

And as for the timing, I agree that such a quick fix is unlikely. I conflated the posts time with the time of the comment, and 15 hours seemed like plenty of time to fix it :P

Using national flags as a language symbol is pretty dodgy anyway. I suppose I could get upset that there's a monarchist flag for English on most websites.