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With the PDK being open, does anyone know if any kind of NDAs are still required to get a chip fabbed? While free-of-charge fabbing is quite nice, I think being
by moring 6y ago
With the PDK being open, does anyone know if any kind of NDAs are still required to get a chip fabbed? While free-of-charge fabbing is quite nice, I think being NDA-free is even more important so all work including the tweaks necessary for fabbing can be published, e.g. on GitHub.
BTW, it will be nice to try this together with the OpenROAD tools [1]. They have support for Google's PDK on their to-do list (planned for q3, but I doubt it will be ready that fast).
[1] https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project
https://theopenroadproject.org/ https://theopenroadproject.org/
- lowwave 6y agoyup, NDAs destroys economic productivity.
- lowwave 6y agoFrom talking to VC. NDA are useless. It really comes down to whether you trust the people or not. It is like patent just a gesture. Everything is in the implementation.
- madushan1000 6y agoI think the plan is to let people do exactly what you're talking about(let people publish everything down to layout files). At least that's the impression I got from the talk. There is a distro of OpenROAD called OpenLane trying to target this PDK. fossie have a couple of more talks coming up in the next few months on tooling support including OpenROAD, OpenLane, etc.. And I think they're aiming for the first shuttle run in November, so the tooling will have to be ready at least on Q3.
- cottonseed 6y agoI don't think so. Tim explains in the talk, designs must be submitted via a public Github repository. I think the whole point is to create an open ecosystem.