7 ms·

So it costs $500 million every time someone designs a SoC and (before now) nobody has spent $100 million trying to make that more efficient?

darzu 8y ago
They have. The problem is that efficient silicon layout is NP-complete and automated tools can't do better than humans today. At best they can assist and detect certain classes of errors. I'm sure Intel has invested more than $100 million on tooling by now.
- ur-whale 8y ago
  There are many NP complete problems where computer do vastly better than humans. But when it comes to EDA, the utterly closed-source culture of the industry has completely prevented what essentially amounts to a horde of smart people to work on the problem: no one - except a very small number insiders - even know what the problems are.
  - detuur 8y ago
    You couldn't be any more dead-on. EDA feels like Scientology, where with every level closer to the core you first need to invest half your life savings + a firstborn. I have an FPGA lying on my desk I can do barely anything interesting with because there are no open-source cores for even simple things like USB3.1 controllers or Thunderbolt or pretty much any interesting bus. Protocols are strongly guarded open secrets where everyone in the industry knows how they work (like MIPI for example) but God Forbid anyone outside the industry might show interest in them. Then you first need a $100k annual membership to the foundation and need to sign and NDA with your blood and that of the next three kin in line. There's a cargo cult confidentiality that achieves absolutely nothing if not completely frustrating out anyone who tries their best to keep their interest in it alive.
    - gascan 8y ago
      because there are no open-source cores for even simple things like USB3.1 controllers or Thunderbolt Those are hardly that simple. There exist entire companies whose function is designing such cores (and licensing them).
      - detuur 8y ago
        Red Hat entirely operates on a business-licensed version of a fundamentally free product. Oracle does pretty much the same. Many large, widely deployed and lucrative software packages are completely open-source. Because there's very few businesses who think that grabbing those packages without vendor support is a good idea. Especially in the EDA industry, with its very sensitive and particular cores, having the source does not guarantee it working, let alone working well. Buying vendor support is cheaper than winging it yourself. I guarantee you, every single Chinese manufacturer who wants to dodge licensing fees has already done so with stolen IP cores. After all, EDA companies are hopelessly stuck in the past and woefully unaware of proper security practices.
      - analognoise 8y ago
        Yeah I'm reading these comments and getting a good laugh.
        ur-whale 8y ago
        Yup. Thanks for proving my point. This comment of yours is precisely the culture I've experienced when talking / trying to work with EDA folks. Snide comments, mockery, "you sw guys just don't get it", and a general ivory-tower attitude towards everyone who's not in the inner circle.
        gascan 8y ago
        I'm a hw guy, FWIW that reaction you see might owe a lot to the periodic castigation directed our way over things like, (paraphrasing) There's a clear need for a Ruby-to-gates compiler, the only possible explanation for why there isn't one is because hw guys just don't get it Hard not to just throw up your hands. The sad irony is a lot of the tools, languages, & culture of today's software could really be valuable- for formal verification. But that doesn't get much attention.
  - ghettoimp 8y ago
    It's really godawful. Software guys have no idea how good they have it. You have layers upon layers of closed source EDA tools and home-brew scripts, all built around horribly abysmal "standards" like SystemVerilog, mostly cobbled together in TCL and Perl. For instance, the following sounds like a horrible joke, but it is real. In a real life, world-class company, port connections between modules are handled using a Perl script. This perl script invokes, I shit you not, an Emacs-Lisp Verilog parser, that scans your files to figure out what submodules you are instantiating, infers the ports that you want to connect, then injects a blob of connections directly into the source code file you were editing. The engineers at this company then commit the output of this Perl script into their source code repository. Predictably the diffs are full of line noise. And you can't escape from this, any of it, because there are so many tools involved, and they all do such useful things, that you end up truly stuck using whatever features all of the tools support. And `ifdefs. Sigh...
    - kazinator 8y ago
      Software guys have it good thanks to software guys; especially the code-sharing, open-sourcing software guys. And mostly just in the last quarter century or so.
    - amelius 8y ago
      > It's really godawful. Software guys have no idea how good they have it. You can also look at it from the other perspective: at least you can still make money making hardware tooling. That is not possible for software tooling, as everything is open-source already.
      - ur-whale 8y ago
        >That is not possible for software tooling, as everything is open-source already You have a very distorted view of OpenSource. People working on OpenSource related project do make money. And lots of it. They're just not selling what essentially amounts to obfuscated source code, a way of doing business that is apparently a great source of astonishment for HW folks. The other point is the state of hardware tooling. Tool vendors may be making money, but their customers are getting shafted something fierce. Every single EDA tool I've used feels like it was written in the 80's: slow, bulky, bloated, opaque, complicated, unpredictable behavior, need band-aids all over the place to get it to do what you actually need (Tcl anyone?) The typical byproduct of an industry focused on secrets instead of innovation.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mips_avatar 8y ago
Yeah when I first read the headline i thought it said 100 Billion, now i'm a little dissapointed
hideo 8y ago
I read that as "nobody has spent $100 million trying to make that more efficient and open sourced it/made it available to smaller companies." Someone who is NOT in the business of SoC design may have wanted to open source something like this just to commoditize their SoCs. But if you're in that business already, then why help reduce the barrier to entry?
- int0x80 8y ago
  If you are rutinely making $500M SoCs, you can benefit yourself too of the automation/process improvement (as an established actor).
xt00 8y ago
I think the primary focus / value here would be if they can somehow dramatically reduce the cost of making masks and IC's. Lets say these researchers make the actual process of converting C code to silicon super easy, then you go to make the chip and they are like, "cool, the mask / fab cost is like 500k USD for samples" -- then basically the exact same people who currently make chips will keep making chips. What would be awesome would be if DARPA funded somebody converting an old 90nm fab into a low cost foundry that was basically fully automated and subsidized it to allow people to make a chip design for $1000 USD, then you would have a flood of people just being like, "well, its $1000 bucks, why the hell not try to make this chip even if its wrong.." most businesses would happily roll the dice on stuff for that kind of price, and some individuals would as well.
- namibj 8y ago
  Uh, for 90nm you should be in the 4-digit range for a hand full of prototypes.
  - xt00 8y ago
    Oh yea I was totally exaggerating since obviously the prices vary tremendously upon the what you are trying to do. I’ve previously worked for a semiconductor company, so there is sort of a “you can pay as much as you want” option always avail if you want a super awesome mixed signal chip. For the general public, do you have a particular place you are aware of that you would pay the 4 digits for the mask plus few prototypes? I was not aware that there was even simple chips you could get in that range.. I mean 4 digits implies what like say 5k... so that’s pretty low cost.... really?
    - namibj 8y ago
      There is one, from the european network to made to provide semiconductor prototyping for universities. [0] [0]: http://www.europractice-ic.com/ http://www.europractice-ic.com/
    - kragen 8y ago
      Both CMP and MOSIS have a number of options that come in under US$10k for a handful of prototypes. Large process nodes, so they won't be competitive for digital stuff, but for analog or mostly analog mixed-signal, they might actually be able to beat anything you can buy off the shelf. Haven't tried it yet myself, though.

darzu 8y ago

They have. The problem is that efficient silicon layout is NP-complete and automated tools can't do better than humans today. At best they can assist and detect certain classes of errors. I'm sure Intel has invested more than $100 million on tooling by now.

ur-whale 8y ago
There are many NP complete problems where computer do vastly better than humans. But when it comes to EDA, the utterly closed-source culture of the industry has completely prevented what essentially amounts to a horde of smart people to work on the problem: no one - except a very small number insiders - even know what the problems are.
- detuur 8y ago
  You couldn't be any more dead-on. EDA feels like Scientology, where with every level closer to the core you first need to invest half your life savings + a firstborn. I have an FPGA lying on my desk I can do barely anything interesting with because there are no open-source cores for even simple things like USB3.1 controllers or Thunderbolt or pretty much any interesting bus. Protocols are strongly guarded open secrets where everyone in the industry knows how they work (like MIPI for example) but God Forbid anyone outside the industry might show interest in them. Then you first need a $100k annual membership to the foundation and need to sign and NDA with your blood and that of the next three kin in line. There's a cargo cult confidentiality that achieves absolutely nothing if not completely frustrating out anyone who tries their best to keep their interest in it alive.
  - gascan 8y ago
    because there are no open-source cores for even simple things like USB3.1 controllers or Thunderbolt Those are hardly that simple. There exist entire companies whose function is designing such cores (and licensing them).
    - detuur 8y ago
      Red Hat entirely operates on a business-licensed version of a fundamentally free product. Oracle does pretty much the same. Many large, widely deployed and lucrative software packages are completely open-source. Because there's very few businesses who think that grabbing those packages without vendor support is a good idea. Especially in the EDA industry, with its very sensitive and particular cores, having the source does not guarantee it working, let alone working well. Buying vendor support is cheaper than winging it yourself. I guarantee you, every single Chinese manufacturer who wants to dodge licensing fees has already done so with stolen IP cores. After all, EDA companies are hopelessly stuck in the past and woefully unaware of proper security practices.
    - analognoise 8y ago
      Yeah I'm reading these comments and getting a good laugh.
      - ur-whale 8y ago
        Yup. Thanks for proving my point. This comment of yours is precisely the culture I've experienced when talking / trying to work with EDA folks. Snide comments, mockery, "you sw guys just don't get it", and a general ivory-tower attitude towards everyone who's not in the inner circle.
        gascan 8y ago
        I'm a hw guy, FWIW that reaction you see might owe a lot to the periodic castigation directed our way over things like, (paraphrasing) There's a clear need for a Ruby-to-gates compiler, the only possible explanation for why there isn't one is because hw guys just don't get it Hard not to just throw up your hands. The sad irony is a lot of the tools, languages, & culture of today's software could really be valuable- for formal verification. But that doesn't get much attention.
- ghettoimp 8y ago
  It's really godawful. Software guys have no idea how good they have it. You have layers upon layers of closed source EDA tools and home-brew scripts, all built around horribly abysmal "standards" like SystemVerilog, mostly cobbled together in TCL and Perl. For instance, the following sounds like a horrible joke, but it is real. In a real life, world-class company, port connections between modules are handled using a Perl script. This perl script invokes, I shit you not, an Emacs-Lisp Verilog parser, that scans your files to figure out what submodules you are instantiating, infers the ports that you want to connect, then injects a blob of connections directly into the source code file you were editing. The engineers at this company then commit the output of this Perl script into their source code repository. Predictably the diffs are full of line noise. And you can't escape from this, any of it, because there are so many tools involved, and they all do such useful things, that you end up truly stuck using whatever features all of the tools support. And `ifdefs. Sigh...
  - kazinator 8y ago
    Software guys have it good thanks to software guys; especially the code-sharing, open-sourcing software guys. And mostly just in the last quarter century or so.
  - amelius 8y ago
    > It's really godawful. Software guys have no idea how good they have it. You can also look at it from the other perspective: at least you can still make money making hardware tooling. That is not possible for software tooling, as everything is open-source already.
    - ur-whale 8y ago
      >That is not possible for software tooling, as everything is open-source already You have a very distorted view of OpenSource. People working on OpenSource related project do make money. And lots of it. They're just not selling what essentially amounts to obfuscated source code, a way of doing business that is apparently a great source of astonishment for HW folks. The other point is the state of hardware tooling. Tool vendors may be making money, but their customers are getting shafted something fierce. Every single EDA tool I've used feels like it was written in the 80's: slow, bulky, bloated, opaque, complicated, unpredictable behavior, need band-aids all over the place to get it to do what you actually need (Tcl anyone?) The typical byproduct of an industry focused on secrets instead of innovation.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mips_avatar 8y ago

Yeah when I first read the headline i thought it said 100 Billion, now i'm a little dissapointed

hideo 8y ago

I read that as "nobody has spent $100 million trying to make that more efficient and open sourced it/made it available to smaller companies." Someone who is NOT in the business of SoC design may have wanted to open source something like this just to commoditize their SoCs. But if you're in that business already, then why help reduce the barrier to entry?

int0x80 8y ago
If you are rutinely making $500M SoCs, you can benefit yourself too of the automation/process improvement (as an established actor).

xt00 8y ago

I think the primary focus / value here would be if they can somehow dramatically reduce the cost of making masks and IC's. Lets say these researchers make the actual process of converting C code to silicon super easy, then you go to make the chip and they are like, "cool, the mask / fab cost is like 500k USD for samples" -- then basically the exact same people who currently make chips will keep making chips. What would be awesome would be if DARPA funded somebody converting an old 90nm fab into a low cost foundry that was basically fully automated and subsidized it to allow people to make a chip design for $1000 USD, then you would have a flood of people just being like, "well, its $1000 bucks, why the hell not try to make this chip even if its wrong.." most businesses would happily roll the dice on stuff for that kind of price, and some individuals would as well.

namibj 8y ago
Uh, for 90nm you should be in the 4-digit range for a hand full of prototypes.
- xt00 8y ago
  Oh yea I was totally exaggerating since obviously the prices vary tremendously upon the what you are trying to do. I’ve previously worked for a semiconductor company, so there is sort of a “you can pay as much as you want” option always avail if you want a super awesome mixed signal chip. For the general public, do you have a particular place you are aware of that you would pay the 4 digits for the mask plus few prototypes? I was not aware that there was even simple chips you could get in that range.. I mean 4 digits implies what like say 5k... so that’s pretty low cost.... really?
  - namibj 8y ago
    There is one, from the european network to made to provide semiconductor prototyping for universities. [0] [0]: http://www.europractice-ic.com/ http://www.europractice-ic.com/
  - kragen 8y ago
    Both CMP and MOSIS have a number of options that come in under US$10k for a handful of prototypes. Large process nodes, so they won't be competitive for digital stuff, but for analog or mostly analog mixed-signal, they might actually be able to beat anything you can buy off the shelf. Haven't tried it yet myself, though.