10 ms·

GlobalFoundries joins Google’s open source silicon initiative

226 points by proppy 4y ago

sylware 4y ago
What's happening with Taiwan/TSMC right now is... china is adamant about taiwan, like putin about the donbass. So it is not unreasonable to think that what is happening for the donbass, will happen for taiwan sooner or later. maybe it is time for top-notch foundries to move out (and the ppl who would require more freedom that the china regime tolerate, like in hong-kong).
colordrops 4y ago
- google234123 4y ago
  This is a shitpost.
  - sorry_outta_gas 4y ago
    The emails leaked a few years ago on twitter say different
    - monetus 4y ago
      Have a link? Curious, but seemingly hard to find.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    What did I say that was inaccurate or untrue?
    - skybrian 4y ago
      It's an off-topic complaint. Just because someone posts a link about Google (or substitute any other company) doesn't mean it's okay to post whatever complaints about Google you want. Particularly when they're the same sort of repetitive complaints people post every time. We've heard it, give it a rest.
      - colordrops 4y ago
        Is it a random complaint though? How is it any different from everyone regularly warning against investing in google services because they are shut down so often? Seems pretty relevant for anyone who is considering investing in this project but isn't aware of Google's behavior with other large open source projects, e.g. Android. Imagine if people told naysayers to shut up when Microsoft was trying to destroy Linux with the SCO lawsuits. Your argumebt actively damages the open source cause.
        skybrian 4y ago
        It’s not any different and that’s exactly the problem. Everyone is well aware by now that sometimes Google shuts down services. Been there, lived it. Writing low-effort comments about how Google often shuts down services makes the Google-related topics on Hacker News more tedious to read and you should stop doing that. Better to share links to interesting and relevant content. News about what was happening with the SCO lawsuit was interesting back in the day. Low-effort complaints about it were not.
        colordrops 4y ago
        I appreciate your opinion, but not your commands about what I should do. I respectfully disagree - I don't think everyone is fully aware of all of Google's particular misdeeds and bad practices, and I don't think the tone around Google efforts is negative enough. My post is one of activism, not complaint.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...
- dragonelite 4y ago
  Pretty much this, just run android without GMS and you quickly discover how limited it can be if you don't know what your doing.
  - adrian_b 4y ago
    Except that there are also a few people like myself. I am now at my 3rd Android smartphone and I have always used all of them without GMS and without a Google account and I do not feel that I have missed anything. All the mobile phone services, camera, clock/calendar, file storage, Web browsing, including the use of anything accessible on the Web, e.g. Google Maps, all work OK, and I do not need anything else from my phone. The very few extra applications that I have installed, e.g. an authentication app for the VPN of my company, have been side loaded, not from the Google Store. The only problem that I have ever had with the lack of a Google account was that one of the banks with which I work has discontinued their Web interface for online banking and has mandated the use of a phone app for authentication. As their staff seems very stupid, they had not provided any way to side load their app, but it could be installed only from the Google Store. Seeing that they cannot be reasoned with, I have canceled my online banking service at that bank and I have reverted to an older form of SMS service, which still provides me most of the features that I need, e.g. receiving notifications on transactions from my accounts and interrogating the accounts balance. The loss is theirs, because I now do more frequently banking operations at other banks, which do not have stupid conditions tied to their online banking services.
    - dragonelite 4y ago
      I just used a Huawei phone for like 2 year without GMS, but you and I are not 99.999 of the general phone users out there. I used Aurora store to access the Playstore, youtube vance to play youtube movies. For the rest i only use Facebook Messenger(for family), whats app, Telegram and my banking app doesn't need GMS to function. Those messenger app have their own notification services so not completely dependent on GMS stuff. For the rest i'm more interested in camera specs and not really in mobile app ecosystem outside of those couple of apps i just need to talk with family and friends.. It is totally doable but don't think 99.999 of the phone users will take the effort to find everything out.
redanddead 4y ago
I might get some hate for this, but Google seems to be doing some really cool things, like in fintech as well as this silicon project. Google Finance is one of the only players I've seen with an interest of opening things up when so much of the industry is about pushing others out and restricting access. Like for example the CME deal, to open source live, low latency stock market data. Bloomberg might let you rent it for 25k a year if you're lucky. Google? Yeah just hook into the websocket bro, it's free. Someone's gotta do it Most of the stock market data the avg person sees is 15 minutes delayed by request of the NYSE, and in a world where trades are reaching the 3 millisecond and below mark, that's a very long time. So Google opening up what could be <20ms data might be able to help some applications. Not saying it's a silver bullet either. I wish they would take on even more big projects that need to be tackled. Like I want to see a google branded remote controlled barge out in the pacific garbage patch that the public is controlling through a google web app or some other insane, good projects. Idk when you deal with finance companies all day, even google seems moral. However, it's not looking good this quarter for all tech cos
- SEJeff 4y ago
  The Pyth Network is exclusively HFT and TradFi big money traders or exchanges and they give it away for free to break the market data monopoly. https://pyth.network https://pyth.network
- xbmcuser 4y ago
  Google main objective for many years was to get as many people online and using digital services as possible so that they can make money of them. I think it is quite under appreciated how much of todays web systems is because of Google using and promoting opensource as well as open sourcing its older tech stack.
- nly 4y ago
  > in a world where trades are reaching the 3 millisecond and below mark Industry average for those colocated and trading using software is going to be closer to something like 20-30 microseconds
- zizee 4y ago
gchadwick 4y ago
When the first open SkyWater 130nm PDK came out, with Google paying for free shuttle runs I did wonder how long the money would keep going. I assumed they'd fund a handful of shuttles in the hope that kick starts wider usage. With this announcement and the other SkyWater 90nm they're bringing out (https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/07/SkyWater-and-Google-expand-open-source-program-to-new-90nm-technology.html https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/07/SkyWater-and-Googl...) it looks like they're keen to fund this for the long haul which is fantastic news. I think there's great potential in open silicon but precious little of it around right now. Open tooling is still in early development stages in particular for implementation flows (i.e. actually producing a silicon layout from your RTL design). Development here is stifled by how closed this world is. Open PDKs, that can be used for real chips, are a great boon and I hope will really accelerate developments.
- specialist 4y ago
  Am noob. I don't know what a shuttle is. efabless.com makes custom short run chips, right? Does this mean Google covered the cost of 240 chips for other people? $2.34m. That's kinda awesome.
skywal_l 4y ago
Can somebody ELI5 this to me? Wbo will that help? And how? 180nm seems big, at least for computer CPUs.
- grandmczeb 4y ago
  This is a very imperfect analogy, but CPUs are typically designed using a high level language like SystemVerilog (equivalent to something like C++ in the software world.) To actually get the CPU manufactured, you have to "compile" it into a binary format that specifies the physical layout of the chip while respecting a set of design rules for whatever process you're targeting. These rules are usually considered highly confidential since they can reveal manufacturing details that the foundry wants to keep secret. This secrecy is part of the reason that open source never really took off for silicon the way it did in the software world - imagine if every time you wanted to compile your code for a new machine you had to pay a bunch of money and sign an NDA. The hope here is that open sourcing the design rules will help build an ecosystem of open source silicon. While it's true that 180nm is too big for anything high performance, it's perfectly fine for hobbyists who don't have the money required for more advanced nodes anyway. On the foundry side, they don't need to be as secretive about old nodes and it might increase demand for underutilized manufacturing capacity.
  - panabee 4y ago
    once a process is no longer bleeding edge, what's the benefit of keeping manufacturing details secret? at this stage, presumably no one would risk the capital and time required to copy the foundry while publishing details increases the likelihood of attracting more clients. thanks in advance for the clarification on why the industry operates the way it does.
    - grandmczeb 4y ago
      > once a process is no longer bleeding edge, what's the benefit of keeping manufacturing details secret? Even if it's not bleeding edge, there still might be special features or secrets they want to protect. For really old nodes, I think it boils down to two reasons: 1) Clients with money don't care about open design rules, so there was basically no demand for it. 2) Foundries generally have a pretty strong culture of secrecy, so without someone asking externally they're not going to open source anything.
unity1001 4y ago
Good initiative.
newaccount2021 4y ago
Kukumber 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ricksunny 4y ago
Been a while since I was in the semiconductor industry, but it looks like this open-sourcing is intended to free up the ecosystem from dependence on Cadence EDA. Nice, could open up opportunity for creation of a lot of cottage fabless semiconductor startups. (does anyone known whether Cadence had ever gotten on the freemium offering model?)
- arroz 4y ago
  Cadence works on some sort of subscription nowadays
rektide 4y ago
Very excited to see another foundry join up! Welcome GlobalFoundries! Last week SkyWater announced a 90nm PDK, which is smaller than the current SkyWater 130nm. Also crucially, this one is FDSOI (fully-depleted silicon on insulator), which keeps chips from leaking power, meaning this should be much more ideal for any kind of mobile always-on design. Neat. And now comes GF's 180MCU PDK. At first, it's like: this is bigger, what the heck! But it's designed for mixed signal & power designs, like Power Management Integrated Circuits (PMICs). Really neat having something a little smaller and something a little bigger right near where we started. I really hope some of the existing people who've done open chip design on the existing shuttles get to make similar-ish chips on the new bigger & smaller processes & can nicely characterize some of the performance differences. This all just makes so much sense. Making sure chipmaking is a healthy, robust, creative, growing industry is in everyone's interest. Without efforts like this, it feels like the industry is at risk of too much consolidation, of everyone getting bought out and/or giving up, and there not being vibrant chipmaking at all. The wave of buyouts across the 201X's was shocking. I continue to think part of the chipmaking crunch was just that there are so many less independent entities now; the diversity of the ecosystem is way down.
koeng 4y ago
Super excited for this! Right now I’m working on a project to build open source DNA synthesis chips (if deployed right, drops DNA synthesis cost by 100-500x market price), and efabless with their tools created with Google’s support have simply enabled the project to even be possible. I am grateful to Google for doing this.
- octoberfranklin 4y ago
  > have simply enabled the project to even be possible Are you sure about that? The mandatory "Caravel" pad ring occupies the entire top layer of the chip as well as a ring around the edges. It hermetically entombs the design area that you control. There is no exposed surface under your control for any kind of chemically-relevant device like a microwell.
  - koeng 4y ago
    "Thank you for reaching out to Efabless! To answer your questions, we can support requests for bare die in our QFN shuttle programs, with the next QFN shuttle having a tapeout of November 14, 2022. Also, the material that you were asking about is aluminum." Correct me if I am wrong, this means I could do this. Perhaps I am wrong! In which case I should find a different chip supplier.
    - octoberfranklin 4y ago
      Unfortunately you are wrong. The padframe and top metal layer which "entomb" Caravel designs are both part of the die. They are not part of the package. Omitting the package does not help you here. You might be confusing the padframe with the leadframe. The padframe is part of the die, the leadframe is part of the package. In a QFN package they are connected to each other by extremely thin gold wires.
      - koeng 4y ago
        Thank god for people correcting me on the internet then! Can look for other providers thanks!
octoberfranklin 4y ago
Important note: this is a high voltage process for things like power+battery management chips. It is not a general logic process. The press release really should mention this. The transistors on this process are very slow and power-hungry, even for such an old process -- the lowest rated supply voltage for this process is 3.3 volts whereas 1.8 volts is typical for 180nm. That's ~3.35x the active power consumption and slower switching speeds due to higher threshhold. It's meant for people who had 350nm designs (mid-1990s) and want to migrate them with the minimum possible effort (nearly all fabs have shut down their 350nm lines). It is totally awesome that Google were able to convince GF to release this PDK! But they should be more up-front about the fact that this is a High Voltage process; most people won't notice the "MCU" at the end of the process name or know what it stands for. Their announcement about a 90nm process with Skywater last week is a big deal; this not so much, unless it's just the first of a series of process releases from GloFo.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  You are right that this is very important. Also this does make this 180 nm variant much more useful. There are many kinds of interfaces or analog devices for which such a high-voltage process is absolutely needed. Now, you can design a complete chip set for certain applications, e.g. with a central chip designed with the 90 nm Skywater PDK and one or more peripheral chips designed with the 180 nm GlobalFoundries PDK, for power management or various interfaces.

226 points by proppy 4y ago

What's happening with Taiwan/TSMC right now is... china is adamant about taiwan, like putin about the donbass. So it is not unreasonable to think that what is happening for the donbass, will happen for taiwan sooner or later. maybe it is time for top-notch foundries to move out (and the ppl who would require more freedom that the china regime tolerate, like in hong-kong).

colordrops 4y ago

google234123 4y ago
This is a shitpost.
- sorry_outta_gas 4y ago
  The emails leaked a few years ago on twitter say different
  - monetus 4y ago
    Have a link? Curious, but seemingly hard to find.
- colordrops 4y ago
  What did I say that was inaccurate or untrue?
  - skybrian 4y ago
    It's an off-topic complaint. Just because someone posts a link about Google (or substitute any other company) doesn't mean it's okay to post whatever complaints about Google you want. Particularly when they're the same sort of repetitive complaints people post every time. We've heard it, give it a rest.
    - colordrops 4y ago
      Is it a random complaint though? How is it any different from everyone regularly warning against investing in google services because they are shut down so often? Seems pretty relevant for anyone who is considering investing in this project but isn't aware of Google's behavior with other large open source projects, e.g. Android. Imagine if people told naysayers to shut up when Microsoft was trying to destroy Linux with the SCO lawsuits. Your argumebt actively damages the open source cause.
      - skybrian 4y ago
        It’s not any different and that’s exactly the problem. Everyone is well aware by now that sometimes Google shuts down services. Been there, lived it. Writing low-effort comments about how Google often shuts down services makes the Google-related topics on Hacker News more tedious to read and you should stop doing that. Better to share links to interesting and relevant content. News about what was happening with the SCO lawsuit was interesting back in the day. Low-effort complaints about it were not.
        colordrops 4y ago
        I appreciate your opinion, but not your commands about what I should do. I respectfully disagree - I don't think everyone is fully aware of all of Google's particular misdeeds and bad practices, and I don't think the tone around Google efforts is negative enough. My post is one of activism, not complaint.
- scarface74 4y ago
  https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...
dragonelite 4y ago
Pretty much this, just run android without GMS and you quickly discover how limited it can be if you don't know what your doing.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  Except that there are also a few people like myself. I am now at my 3rd Android smartphone and I have always used all of them without GMS and without a Google account and I do not feel that I have missed anything. All the mobile phone services, camera, clock/calendar, file storage, Web browsing, including the use of anything accessible on the Web, e.g. Google Maps, all work OK, and I do not need anything else from my phone. The very few extra applications that I have installed, e.g. an authentication app for the VPN of my company, have been side loaded, not from the Google Store. The only problem that I have ever had with the lack of a Google account was that one of the banks with which I work has discontinued their Web interface for online banking and has mandated the use of a phone app for authentication. As their staff seems very stupid, they had not provided any way to side load their app, but it could be installed only from the Google Store. Seeing that they cannot be reasoned with, I have canceled my online banking service at that bank and I have reverted to an older form of SMS service, which still provides me most of the features that I need, e.g. receiving notifications on transactions from my accounts and interrogating the accounts balance. The loss is theirs, because I now do more frequently banking operations at other banks, which do not have stupid conditions tied to their online banking services.
  - dragonelite 4y ago
    I just used a Huawei phone for like 2 year without GMS, but you and I are not 99.999 of the general phone users out there. I used Aurora store to access the Playstore, youtube vance to play youtube movies. For the rest i only use Facebook Messenger(for family), whats app, Telegram and my banking app doesn't need GMS to function. Those messenger app have their own notification services so not completely dependent on GMS stuff. For the rest i'm more interested in camera specs and not really in mobile app ecosystem outside of those couple of apps i just need to talk with family and friends.. It is totally doable but don't think 99.999 of the phone users will take the effort to find everything out.

redanddead 4y ago

I might get some hate for this, but Google seems to be doing some really cool things, like in fintech as well as this silicon project. Google Finance is one of the only players I've seen with an interest of opening things up when so much of the industry is about pushing others out and restricting access. Like for example the CME deal, to open source live, low latency stock market data. Bloomberg might let you rent it for 25k a year if you're lucky. Google? Yeah just hook into the websocket bro, it's free. Someone's gotta do it Most of the stock market data the avg person sees is 15 minutes delayed by request of the NYSE, and in a world where trades are reaching the 3 millisecond and below mark, that's a very long time. So Google opening up what could be <20ms data might be able to help some applications. Not saying it's a silver bullet either. I wish they would take on even more big projects that need to be tackled. Like I want to see a google branded remote controlled barge out in the pacific garbage patch that the public is controlling through a google web app or some other insane, good projects. Idk when you deal with finance companies all day, even google seems moral. However, it's not looking good this quarter for all tech cos

SEJeff 4y ago
The Pyth Network is exclusively HFT and TradFi big money traders or exchanges and they give it away for free to break the market data monopoly. https://pyth.network https://pyth.network
xbmcuser 4y ago
Google main objective for many years was to get as many people online and using digital services as possible so that they can make money of them. I think it is quite under appreciated how much of todays web systems is because of Google using and promoting opensource as well as open sourcing its older tech stack.
nly 4y ago
> in a world where trades are reaching the 3 millisecond and below mark Industry average for those colocated and trading using software is going to be closer to something like 20-30 microseconds
zizee 4y ago

gchadwick 4y ago

When the first open SkyWater 130nm PDK came out, with Google paying for free shuttle runs I did wonder how long the money would keep going. I assumed they'd fund a handful of shuttles in the hope that kick starts wider usage. With this announcement and the other SkyWater 90nm they're bringing out (https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/07/SkyWater-and-Google-expand-open-source-program-to-new-90nm-technology.html https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/07/SkyWater-and-Googl...) it looks like they're keen to fund this for the long haul which is fantastic news. I think there's great potential in open silicon but precious little of it around right now. Open tooling is still in early development stages in particular for implementation flows (i.e. actually producing a silicon layout from your RTL design). Development here is stifled by how closed this world is. Open PDKs, that can be used for real chips, are a great boon and I hope will really accelerate developments.

specialist 4y ago
Am noob. I don't know what a shuttle is. efabless.com makes custom short run chips, right? Does this mean Google covered the cost of 240 chips for other people? $2.34m. That's kinda awesome.

skywal_l 4y ago

Can somebody ELI5 this to me? Wbo will that help? And how? 180nm seems big, at least for computer CPUs.

grandmczeb 4y ago
This is a very imperfect analogy, but CPUs are typically designed using a high level language like SystemVerilog (equivalent to something like C++ in the software world.) To actually get the CPU manufactured, you have to "compile" it into a binary format that specifies the physical layout of the chip while respecting a set of design rules for whatever process you're targeting. These rules are usually considered highly confidential since they can reveal manufacturing details that the foundry wants to keep secret. This secrecy is part of the reason that open source never really took off for silicon the way it did in the software world - imagine if every time you wanted to compile your code for a new machine you had to pay a bunch of money and sign an NDA. The hope here is that open sourcing the design rules will help build an ecosystem of open source silicon. While it's true that 180nm is too big for anything high performance, it's perfectly fine for hobbyists who don't have the money required for more advanced nodes anyway. On the foundry side, they don't need to be as secretive about old nodes and it might increase demand for underutilized manufacturing capacity.
- panabee 4y ago
  once a process is no longer bleeding edge, what's the benefit of keeping manufacturing details secret? at this stage, presumably no one would risk the capital and time required to copy the foundry while publishing details increases the likelihood of attracting more clients. thanks in advance for the clarification on why the industry operates the way it does.
  - grandmczeb 4y ago
    > once a process is no longer bleeding edge, what's the benefit of keeping manufacturing details secret? Even if it's not bleeding edge, there still might be special features or secrets they want to protect. For really old nodes, I think it boils down to two reasons: 1) Clients with money don't care about open design rules, so there was basically no demand for it. 2) Foundries generally have a pretty strong culture of secrecy, so without someone asking externally they're not going to open source anything.

unity1001 4y ago

Good initiative.

newaccount2021 4y ago

Kukumber 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ricksunny 4y ago

Been a while since I was in the semiconductor industry, but it looks like this open-sourcing is intended to free up the ecosystem from dependence on Cadence EDA. Nice, could open up opportunity for creation of a lot of cottage fabless semiconductor startups. (does anyone known whether Cadence had ever gotten on the freemium offering model?)

arroz 4y ago
Cadence works on some sort of subscription nowadays

rektide 4y ago

Very excited to see another foundry join up! Welcome GlobalFoundries! Last week SkyWater announced a 90nm PDK, which is smaller than the current SkyWater 130nm. Also crucially, this one is FDSOI (fully-depleted silicon on insulator), which keeps chips from leaking power, meaning this should be much more ideal for any kind of mobile always-on design. Neat. And now comes GF's 180MCU PDK. At first, it's like: this is bigger, what the heck! But it's designed for mixed signal & power designs, like Power Management Integrated Circuits (PMICs). Really neat having something a little smaller and something a little bigger right near where we started. I really hope some of the existing people who've done open chip design on the existing shuttles get to make similar-ish chips on the new bigger & smaller processes & can nicely characterize some of the performance differences. This all just makes so much sense. Making sure chipmaking is a healthy, robust, creative, growing industry is in everyone's interest. Without efforts like this, it feels like the industry is at risk of too much consolidation, of everyone getting bought out and/or giving up, and there not being vibrant chipmaking at all. The wave of buyouts across the 201X's was shocking. I continue to think part of the chipmaking crunch was just that there are so many less independent entities now; the diversity of the ecosystem is way down.

koeng 4y ago

Super excited for this! Right now I’m working on a project to build open source DNA synthesis chips (if deployed right, drops DNA synthesis cost by 100-500x market price), and efabless with their tools created with Google’s support have simply enabled the project to even be possible. I am grateful to Google for doing this.

octoberfranklin 4y ago
> have simply enabled the project to even be possible Are you sure about that? The mandatory "Caravel" pad ring occupies the entire top layer of the chip as well as a ring around the edges. It hermetically entombs the design area that you control. There is no exposed surface under your control for any kind of chemically-relevant device like a microwell.
- koeng 4y ago
  "Thank you for reaching out to Efabless! To answer your questions, we can support requests for bare die in our QFN shuttle programs, with the next QFN shuttle having a tapeout of November 14, 2022. Also, the material that you were asking about is aluminum." Correct me if I am wrong, this means I could do this. Perhaps I am wrong! In which case I should find a different chip supplier.
  - octoberfranklin 4y ago
    Unfortunately you are wrong. The padframe and top metal layer which "entomb" Caravel designs are both part of the die. They are not part of the package. Omitting the package does not help you here. You might be confusing the padframe with the leadframe. The padframe is part of the die, the leadframe is part of the package. In a QFN package they are connected to each other by extremely thin gold wires.
    - koeng 4y ago
      Thank god for people correcting me on the internet then! Can look for other providers thanks!

octoberfranklin 4y ago

Important note: this is a high voltage process for things like power+battery management chips. It is not a general logic process. The press release really should mention this. The transistors on this process are very slow and power-hungry, even for such an old process -- the lowest rated supply voltage for this process is 3.3 volts whereas 1.8 volts is typical for 180nm. That's ~3.35x the active power consumption and slower switching speeds due to higher threshhold. It's meant for people who had 350nm designs (mid-1990s) and want to migrate them with the minimum possible effort (nearly all fabs have shut down their 350nm lines). It is totally awesome that Google were able to convince GF to release this PDK! But they should be more up-front about the fact that this is a High Voltage process; most people won't notice the "MCU" at the end of the process name or know what it stands for. Their announcement about a 90nm process with Skywater last week is a big deal; this not so much, unless it's just the first of a series of process releases from GloFo.

adrian_b 4y ago
You are right that this is very important. Also this does make this 180 nm variant much more useful. There are many kinds of interfaces or analog devices for which such a high-voltage process is absolutely needed. Now, you can design a complete chip set for certain applications, e.g. with a central chip designed with the 90 nm Skywater PDK and one or more peripheral chips designed with the 180 nm GlobalFoundries PDK, for power management or various interfaces.