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[FOSSi Dial-Up] Tim Ansell - Skywater PDK: Fully open source manufacturable PDK for a 130nm process

FOSSi Foundation

6.8K subscribers • 2 videos on Hallway

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  • Recommended by 2 people: 1 on Hacker News and 1 in engineering communities.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2020 to 2024.
  • Presented by Tim Ansell

Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.

33K views6 years ago2 recommendations

HardwareSystems programmingCPUs and computer architectureOpen sourceElectronics

Tim Ansell introduces the SkyWater PDK, a fully open-source, manufacturable process development kit enabling open-source ASIC design and fabrication.

This is the first episode of FOSSi Dial-Up Tim Ansell presents a fully open source Process Development Kit (PDK), an important part of a fully open chip design flow. The PDK, developed together with the Skywater foundry, enables everyone to create chips with a fully open source flow. Learn more about the Skywater PDK at fossi-foundation.org/2020/06/30/skywater-pdk Tim's slides are available at j.mp/du20-sky130 FOSSi Dial-Up is an online event series by the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation. Head over to fossi-foundation.org/dial-up/ for a list of talks.

Why it's here

2 people recommend this, 1 disputes it

What people say. Recommended as a landmark presentation on the first fully open-source manufacturable PDK for custom silicon design.

Moments people linked to

u/citypwin r/FPGA • Recommends

Fully open source manufacturable PDK for a 130nm process
44View on Reddit

panick21_on Hacker News • Recommends

On “RISC-V is currently slow compared to modern CPUs”

…only considering manufacturing but if you broaden your point of view and look at the whole value chain, it absolutely does. And you know who agrees with me, tons of companies who have invested in RISC-V and the ecosystem. If you don't believe me, I suggest you watch this video from Google where they explain why they are doing what they are doing: link to this video You can find videos like that from other companies, including hardware companies. > It doesn't obviate the challenges or costs of developing new process nodes or chemistries. I didn't know that producing hardware was the same as developing knew nodes. In your mind, the only thing that matters is the cost of ne…

octoberfranklinon Hacker News • Disputes

On “Google partners with SkyWater to enable open source manufacturing of ASICs”

> It was talked about all over the place. Really? Where can we read about it? > E.g. see link to this video from June around the one hour mark. What are you referring to, where exactly in there? I poked "around the one hour mark" and didn't stumble across it, but am not gonna watch the whole thing. It's over an hour of somebody talking at a camera. Does an offhand comment buried in the middle of a 90-minute youtube ramble really strike you as appropriate notification of such an important requirement? Especially when this requirement doesn't appear anyplace where it can be read ?

u/benreynwarin r/FPGA • Mentions

Fully open-source ASIC flow Not an FPGA topic, but I think a lot of people here might be interested. Google and Skywater just released a fully open source process design kit for a 130 nm process. This means that anyone can now use a fully open flow to create an ASIC chip without having to sign any NDAs or buy any tools. If you have an open-source design you'd like to tape-out using this process, google is sponsoring free shuttles (open-source projects only) with the first occurring towards the end of this year. Check out the video at: [video

cottonseedon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips”

Google wants to create an open, innovative ecosystem for silicon so it will be easier for them to build accelerators for their workloads to meet the growing demand for compute. TPU is only one example of the kind of accelerators they want to build. Tim directly addresses this in the talk: link to this video .

nickikon Hacker News • Mentions

On “What is a System-on-Chip (SoC), and why do we care if they are open source?”

Google, FOSSi and eFabless are working on a 100% open source chip design workflow that would allow you to use only open source tools to create a chip, and thanks to other efforts open source chips and ISA exist already: See: link to this video

KenoFischeron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Google partners with SkyWater to enable open source manufacturing of ASICs”

It was talked about all over the place. E.g. see link to this video from June around the one hour mark. As I said, I'm very far from an insider.

nickikon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Libre-SoC 180nm Power ISA v3.0 ASIC Submitted to IMEC MPW”

Google has done a lot of effort in that direction. The first ever chips have already been produced that are fully open source from the tools used to make to the complete tool chain need to manufacture them. There is a huge amount of great stuff going on this this area. Tim Ansell - Skywater PDK: Fully open source manufacturable PDK for a 130nm process link to this video