[0] https://cyber.nyu.edu/2024/07/22/chipchat-nyu-tandon-team-fa...
Looks like yes: https://store.efabless.com/products/tiny-tapeout-project
KenoFischer says no, Tiny Tapeout was using eFabless as their service provider and is looking into alternatives.
Something's fishy. https://efabless.com/news doesn't list any shutdown notices.
The IHP PDK is really a lot more exciting to me than the Skywater stuff because it's aimed at submillimeter analog things (450GHz fₜ, 650GHz fastest oscillator) and why would you fab a digital design in 130nm instead of just programming an FPGA?
I haven't paid that much attention, but in my utopia, they would have received some funding from the CHIPS act just to act as a gateway for educating people on how to design and make chips. But we live here.
America's such a technology hub because of our silicon foundry, because of MOSIS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSIS
Carver Mead & Lynn Conway got countless students & interested parties out there, making chips. Introduction to VLSI Design was a book, but also a whole practice of getting out there and doing the thing for real. So so so much innovation & creativity followed.
Efabless felt like such a great hope that the tradition could continue, that maybe perhaps we could have a new age of newcomers also starting to make chips.
And you can still use all the open source stuff, like the eFabless pad frame, if you want. But you’ll have to work with SkyWater directly which does require various business agreements to be in place.
See more here:
https://www.skywatertechnology.com/technology-and-design-ena...
The problem is access to software and fabs. EDA is expensive and nobody will give access to individuals. Same for fabs. They don't want to give access to a lot of people due to IP theft risks. Anyone can be a North Korean hacker. Plus they operate under US export controls which makes the paperwork daunting.
I assume they require an NDA for their PDK? Or can projects still be meaningfully open-source with the existing one?
If you know the right person, TSMC also has an MPW service (as do most other foundries). Most of the slots on these services go toward high-volume customers and universities, especially at the high-tech PDKs.
Other low-cost (at least low relative to the huge costs of silicon fabrication) services exist but typically they have little public information and will certainly require proprietary tools and PDKs (which are not cheap and require you to persuade the sales people to talk to you to even find out what these costs are).
If you're talking about how much it takes to build the fab: infinity dollars, nobody builds new fabs in these nodes anymore. Skywater is barely keeping its head above water as-is and that's mostly wafer services, not tapeouts.
https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-the-design-decisions-behind-the-...
Video from 38c3 talk 2024-Dec-29; question at time 31min:17sec.
This company, and its enablers (formerly) at Google, set back the progress of open source chip design by at least three full years with this bait-and-switch insanity. The people who could see through the ruse wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole; meanwhile it sucked up all the students, momentum, and funding.
Think about what three years of progress is worth in the tech industry.
Caravel is fully open source. You can audit it. There is no ROM (except for a project ID), just 1.5KB of RAM, a CPU, a few peripherals and (most importantly) the pad ring.
Caravel is a (questionable) attempt to lower the barriers of entry to silicon design, both the cost and required skill.
It lowers cost, because every single chip on the MPW is the same size, and can be tested with a common interface. They can test the RISC-V core and pad ring to get a good indication of the die quality (theoretically they can upload user-submitted code to test the actual design, but I don't think have implemented that), and only package up the highest quality dies that are most likely to work.
It lowers required skill, because the user doesn't have to worry about getting the pad ring right. When they receive their chip, they are guaranteed to have a working RISC-V core, and caravel provides a bunch of logic analyser probes you can hook directly into your design to debug why it's not working.
It also meant anyone who actually wanted a CPU core in their design got something that was guaranteed to work and easy to integrate.
The Caravel harness makes it very clear what the target market for the eFabless product is. It's not for end products, you only get a few chips. It's for people, especially hobbyists to learn how to do silicon design. (Though, IMO it's nowhere near cheap enough for that target market.)
If you want an actual end product, you should be contracting either with eFabless or directly with Skywater for a full wafer with a custom pad ring.
in theory only.
caravel had hold time violations and the pin configuration mostly didn’t work for the first 5 or 6 sponsored OpenMPW shuttles.
To clarify, since unfortunately griefers are flagging your comment to impede the discussion, so I'm not allowed to reply to it: Tiny Tapeout is a multi-project chip, not a multi-project wafer (though it is one chip in a multi-project wafer). Typical minimum die sizes are 0.8mm², which is about 2 million potential transistors in 130nm processes. That's big enough to put many projects on a chip. That's why Tiny Tapeout cost US$300 while MPW prices start at about US$3000 and more typically US$9999+.
The Caravel management engine is used for single project chips, but it is innocuous. It just allows debugging and probing signals, and use of common I/O structure for different user projects. You don't have to actively use it.
It's hardly hidden, too: you have to instantiate it.
They cut the wafer apart into individual chips. There is one project on each chip.
This has been going on since the 1970s. It is a very well-understood process.
