A good friend of mine sent me an article yesterday (Produce your own physical chips for free, in the open) that announced a collaboration between Google, Skywater Technology Foundry and FOSSi (Free and open source silicon) Foundation that ultimately supplies a completely open source set of tools to create ASICs at 130nm node ASIC level. The last piece of this toolkit was an open source PDK (Process Design Kit) data that was produced by Google-Skywater technologies and their offer for free fab services to manufacture chips that were designed with the tool set.

Layout snapshots of 2D and 3D ICs designed in 130-nm process technology: (a) 2D IC (2D-130); (b) the top and bottom tiers of a 3D IC using macro-level partitioning (3D-MP-130); and (c) the top and bottom tiers of a 3D IC using pipeline-level partitioning (3D-PP-130). 

The industry and I have had a long term discussion in this blog and elsewhere about the superiority of hardware innovation vs. software innovation using commodity hardware (e.g., see TPU and hardware vs. software innovation (Round 3) and Hardware vs. software innovation – Round 4). Most of the tech industry believes that software innovation on commodity hardware is better than hardware innovation. We beg to differ and in our mind, it’s the combination of hardware AND software innovation that is remaking the world.

Much of this can be seen with smart phone technology. The smart phone would not be possible without significant hardware innovation and has supplied ubiquitous computing for the world. That is it has connected billions to the internet that had no connection before.

But historically, hardware innovation has been hard to do, took a long time, and costs a lot vs. software innovation with commodity hardware, which by definition, is easier to do, takes almost no time (with continuous innovation even less) and costs almost nothing, especially when using open source.

The one innovation that emerged over the last few decades to make new hardware creation easier, has been the FPGA. FPGAs allow for “programing” hardware logic in the lab (sometime in the field) rather than having it be set in silicon in the fab. The toolchains to support FPGA programming can be proprietary but some are also available in open source. For example, SymbiFlow (open source) takes in Verilog (IEEE standard hardware definition language) and converts it into a binary bit stream used to program most (Xilinx-7 and Lattice) FPGAs.

But this recent announcement makes the process to create ASICs completely open source and much easier and cheaper to do

ASICs design flow

Prior to this announcement, most PDKs were expensive and specific to a particular FAB and process node. With Google’s and Skywater’s release of open source PDK (on GitHub) data, designers and engineers now have a completely open source tool kit that is they have RTL (Register-transfer-level, hardware description logic) design tools, EDA tools and PDK data to create their own ASICs. And with this toolkit Skywater together with Google will manufacture ASICs for you, at no cost.

The FOSSi dial up talk (embedded in the announcement above) goes into much detail about the FPGA and ASIC tool chain. but prior to this announcement the PDK data which is used to help the RTL and EDA tools simulate, verify and determine the optimum layout for the hardware design was always proprietary.

Open source RTL tools have been available for years now starting with OpenCores, OpenRISC, RISC-V and now OpenPower. RISC-V and OpenPower include RTL to implement sophisticade instruction set CPUs. OpenRISC is RTL for a precursor to RISC-V and OpenCores supplies the RTL for a number of other (CPU) cores. But this is just a sample of the RTL that’s available in open source.

EDA Tools are also available in open source. The most recent incarnation would be the DARPA funded, OpenROAD project. OpenROAD will ultimately provide a completely open source EDA Tool set for electronic design. The first component of this is a set of EDA tools that convert RTL to GDS II (industry standard graphical design stream description of a IC chip componentry and layout). GDS II streams are used to create masks for IC fabrication.

And now with the open source Google-Skywater PDK data, one has a complete open source tool chain to create ASICs at the 130nm node level for the Skywater Fab in Minnesota.

A PDK contains a lot of data about the ASIC fabrication process including process design rules, analog and digital design cells and models, behavioral models for analog and digital design, extracted data for simulation and other supporting functionality.

The Google-Skywater Technologies open source PDK is Apache 2.0 Licensed. The PDK is used in the SKY130 process node, which includes 130nm technologies, high voltage support, 5 metal layers and one interconnect layer.

At the moment the PDK includes standard digital cell support (“nor” gates, “and” gates, flip flops, etc.) but over time they are planning to add analog cells, IO & periphery cells, analog RF as well a fully automated design rule checking, with SRAM/flash build spaces.

The PDK does include standard SRAM bit cells and in combination with OpenRAM project one can use SRAM cells to create SRAM memory for the ASIC.

Google-Skywater are going to be fabricating, for free, up to 40 ASIC designs starting in Fall of 2020 and then six months later, they will start fabricating ~40 ASICs ever 3 months.

However to qualify for free fabrication, your design has to be completely open source (located on GitHub). To submit your ASIC you need to send your public GitHub URL repository to efabless and they will perform verification processes on it. If it works, they will respond with an email that it was accepted. If more than 40 designs are submitted for a run, the Google-Skywater team will decide on which 40 will be manufactured

The 16mm**2 ASIC automatically comes with a RISC-V CPU, RAM and power plus ~40 IOs. There is another 10mm**2 space for all of your ASIC specific logic. If successful, you will get back ~100 to 400 packaged chips.

ASICs were always lengthy and costly to design and then fabrication took more money and time, before you got anything back to test. With Open source tool kits, design should no longer cost anything but engineering time and with the sophistication available is todays toolchain, should not be that lengthy. And if your one of the lucky 40 designs, ASIC fabrication is free. And then starting next year fabrication runs will occur every 3 months. So you could potentially get your design back in an ASIC in as little as 3 months.

And while the 130nm technology node dates back to 2001-2003, there were plenty of sophisticated ASICss made during those years (at a previous job, we did a couple ourselves). And of course, with your very own RISC-V CPU inside, you could pretty much do anything you want with your ASIC. Yeah RAM, SRAM and other constraints may limit you, but that’s what hardware innovation is all about, deal with the physical constraints but open up a whole new architectural world.

Welcome to the a new era of ASIC (hardware) innovation.

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