4 ms·

Time to open source the chip making industry... ... ... This whole fabrication thing is a biiig chokepoint.

by lofaszvanitt 3y ago

wincy 3y ago
About as likely as open source nuke design.
- alwayslikethis 3y ago
  If we ignore the sanctions you'll be getting, open sourcing nuke design is much easier.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Building one the WW2 designs isn't really that hard today, is it? Getting the fission material on the other hand... Just ask Doc Brown, because it is not the 80s anymore were you get Plutonium at pharmacies, ah those days!
  - pests 3y ago
    It depends. Little boy would be easiest as the speherical detonation and materials science for the Fat Man implosion would still be difficult to design and machine. I also do not beleive the activator designs have ever been declassified.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Doesn't have to be an exact copy so, but yes design might be tricky. I assume solvable so, at least in a primitive and workable way. Machining, to be honest, beside size of the parts themselves, is something you can do in some reasonably well equipped maker space. And for size, CNC machines are readily available on the used market. And those are light years ahead of anything the Manhatten project had. Or Apollo for that matter (excluding the Saturn V of course, but that is rocket science).
      - trashtester 3y ago
        From my undertanding, Fat Man requires a very precise design to focus the shock wave properly, or the bomb will never detonate properly. This design is quite non-trivial even today. It took several of the brightest minds of all time to get it just right back then (like von Neumann). Even with modern tools, you still need a team of quite capable engineers/scientists to pull something like that off, even if you do have the plutonium. The little boy design is easier to engineer, but bomb grade uranium is even harder to produce than plutonium.
        hef19898 3y ago
        Totally agree, the science / design part of it is still not trivial. Also I know next to nothing about it. The machining bit so, uaing proper machinery, is easy. And the necessary engineers and technicians readily available.
        trashtester 3y ago
        Not even a 1000 normal engineers can replace a single von Neumann. What makes it easier, though, is that the general principle is relatively well known, so one could always brute force the solution using computer simulations, even if unable to do the math by hand.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  North Korea can build a Nuke without OS. I doubt they can build a semi fab even with OS.
HankB99 3y ago
Isn't the cost of the equipment and sophistication required to operate the biggest barrier to entry? How would open sourcing change that?
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  It wouldn't. HN lives in a SW bubble where Foss is the solution to everything , but fails to see that capital is the main barrier in the semi industry and, unlike their Node library, the secret sauce of cutting edge chips is a matter of national security at this point and will be kept as close to the chest as possible.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    Actually if the IC design tools would be FOSS, the cost of new designs would decrease considerably, even up to two times. The cost of the subscriptions to the design tools provided by Cadence, Synopsis, Siemens (Mentor) and a few others is ridiculously high and it can contribute with many millions of $ to the design cost of a state-of-the-art chip. The design tools themselves have been improved extremely slowly and they are of a quite low quality for so expensive professional tools. In an open-source environment it would be easy to make much better alternatives. The reason that only a few timid attempts exist to provide alternatives for only some parts of a complete toolchain, is that the semiconductor manufacturers, like TSMC, do not provide public information about the exact data that they need as input for manufacturing, about the design rules that must be implemented for valid designs and about the characteristics of their processes that must be known for simulations. All this information is available only to big companies like Synopsis, Cadence etc. and this perpetuates their monopoly and their ability of extracting huge amounts of money with minimal software development work, from all the companies that design ICs. While the companies that design ICs are not happy for this huge rent that they pay for the design tools, they are also extremely risk-averse and they do not want to make any change in their design workflows, no matter how small, that might increase the risks of failure in a designed chip. Because of this there are no chances of replacing the incumbents with open-source tools, at least not in the big established companies that design chips.
0_____0 3y ago
This is exactly the kind of thing that will never be open source. Any entity with the extremely high level of resources to fabricate chips at this node have zero incentive to open source anything, and no number of amateurs with 3D printers can change that.
- lofaszvanitt 3y ago
  Would be nice to fabricate your own chips.
sloreti 3y ago
Read Chip Wars [1]. The cost to stand up an advanced chip fab has reached tens of billions of dollars. It’s so capital intensive that even the US Department of Defense has exited the game. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_War:_The_Fight_for_the_World's_Most_Critical_Technology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_War:_The_Fight_for_the_...
- champagnepapi 3y ago
  I’ve read it, and I agree with you 100%. Open sourcing won’t don’t anything with an ASML machine costs $300,000,000. Open sourcing software works because some many people already have the hardware (a computer)
  - viscanti 3y ago
    And it's not just needing to buy the ASML machine. There's a ton of proprietary knowhow to actually get it integrated into a fab so that yields are reasonable.
samtho 3y ago
Semiconductor manufacturing requires a lot of capital expense just to open the doors, it also requires a staff of all levels to keep the machinery working and multiple suppliers for raw materials that require multi-thousand dollar minimum orders. The process these facilities implement are fairly well understood, it’s just cost prohibitive. If you’re trying to draw parallels between this is and, say 3D printing, you will not find many similarities. PCB fabrication is also a a different beast but a lot of people think it’s as easy as finding a fab house that takes gerber files and creates a board for them. If we want something that more closely resembles how we develop software, we probably will need to develop processes that enables us to flash FPGAs like MCUs, make them fully read only, and allow the customer to etch their own marking onto the chip. There facilities that produce ASICs like this already, but I can see something more standardized becoming more successful for general purpose. This does however require that we have a foundry create the original chips, the difference here is that they are producing the same standardized chip for everyone which would allow any foundry to make compatible alternatives.
- lofaszvanitt 3y ago
  Yeah, we know this way. It's as convoluted and deliberately complex as building a nuclear plant.

Time to open source the chip making industry... ... ... This whole fabrication thing is a biiig chokepoint.

wincy 3y ago

About as likely as open source nuke design.

alwayslikethis 3y ago
If we ignore the sanctions you'll be getting, open sourcing nuke design is much easier.
hef19898 3y ago
Building one the WW2 designs isn't really that hard today, is it? Getting the fission material on the other hand... Just ask Doc Brown, because it is not the 80s anymore were you get Plutonium at pharmacies, ah those days!
- pests 3y ago
  It depends. Little boy would be easiest as the speherical detonation and materials science for the Fat Man implosion would still be difficult to design and machine. I also do not beleive the activator designs have ever been declassified.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Doesn't have to be an exact copy so, but yes design might be tricky. I assume solvable so, at least in a primitive and workable way. Machining, to be honest, beside size of the parts themselves, is something you can do in some reasonably well equipped maker space. And for size, CNC machines are readily available on the used market. And those are light years ahead of anything the Manhatten project had. Or Apollo for that matter (excluding the Saturn V of course, but that is rocket science).
    - trashtester 3y ago
      From my undertanding, Fat Man requires a very precise design to focus the shock wave properly, or the bomb will never detonate properly. This design is quite non-trivial even today. It took several of the brightest minds of all time to get it just right back then (like von Neumann). Even with modern tools, you still need a team of quite capable engineers/scientists to pull something like that off, even if you do have the plutonium. The little boy design is easier to engineer, but bomb grade uranium is even harder to produce than plutonium.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Totally agree, the science / design part of it is still not trivial. Also I know next to nothing about it. The machining bit so, uaing proper machinery, is easy. And the necessary engineers and technicians readily available.
        trashtester 3y ago
        Not even a 1000 normal engineers can replace a single von Neumann. What makes it easier, though, is that the general principle is relatively well known, so one could always brute force the solution using computer simulations, even if unable to do the math by hand.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
North Korea can build a Nuke without OS. I doubt they can build a semi fab even with OS.

HankB99 3y ago

Isn't the cost of the equipment and sophistication required to operate the biggest barrier to entry? How would open sourcing change that?

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
It wouldn't. HN lives in a SW bubble where Foss is the solution to everything , but fails to see that capital is the main barrier in the semi industry and, unlike their Node library, the secret sauce of cutting edge chips is a matter of national security at this point and will be kept as close to the chest as possible.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  Actually if the IC design tools would be FOSS, the cost of new designs would decrease considerably, even up to two times. The cost of the subscriptions to the design tools provided by Cadence, Synopsis, Siemens (Mentor) and a few others is ridiculously high and it can contribute with many millions of $ to the design cost of a state-of-the-art chip. The design tools themselves have been improved extremely slowly and they are of a quite low quality for so expensive professional tools. In an open-source environment it would be easy to make much better alternatives. The reason that only a few timid attempts exist to provide alternatives for only some parts of a complete toolchain, is that the semiconductor manufacturers, like TSMC, do not provide public information about the exact data that they need as input for manufacturing, about the design rules that must be implemented for valid designs and about the characteristics of their processes that must be known for simulations. All this information is available only to big companies like Synopsis, Cadence etc. and this perpetuates their monopoly and their ability of extracting huge amounts of money with minimal software development work, from all the companies that design ICs. While the companies that design ICs are not happy for this huge rent that they pay for the design tools, they are also extremely risk-averse and they do not want to make any change in their design workflows, no matter how small, that might increase the risks of failure in a designed chip. Because of this there are no chances of replacing the incumbents with open-source tools, at least not in the big established companies that design chips.

0_____0 3y ago

This is exactly the kind of thing that will never be open source. Any entity with the extremely high level of resources to fabricate chips at this node have zero incentive to open source anything, and no number of amateurs with 3D printers can change that.

lofaszvanitt 3y ago
Would be nice to fabricate your own chips.

sloreti 3y ago

Read Chip Wars [1]. The cost to stand up an advanced chip fab has reached tens of billions of dollars. It’s so capital intensive that even the US Department of Defense has exited the game. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_War:_The_Fight_for_the_World's_Most_Critical_Technology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_War:_The_Fight_for_the_...

champagnepapi 3y ago
I’ve read it, and I agree with you 100%. Open sourcing won’t don’t anything with an ASML machine costs $300,000,000. Open sourcing software works because some many people already have the hardware (a computer)
- viscanti 3y ago
  And it's not just needing to buy the ASML machine. There's a ton of proprietary knowhow to actually get it integrated into a fab so that yields are reasonable.

samtho 3y ago

Semiconductor manufacturing requires a lot of capital expense just to open the doors, it also requires a staff of all levels to keep the machinery working and multiple suppliers for raw materials that require multi-thousand dollar minimum orders. The process these facilities implement are fairly well understood, it’s just cost prohibitive. If you’re trying to draw parallels between this is and, say 3D printing, you will not find many similarities. PCB fabrication is also a a different beast but a lot of people think it’s as easy as finding a fab house that takes gerber files and creates a board for them. If we want something that more closely resembles how we develop software, we probably will need to develop processes that enables us to flash FPGAs like MCUs, make them fully read only, and allow the customer to etch their own marking onto the chip. There facilities that produce ASICs like this already, but I can see something more standardized becoming more successful for general purpose. This does however require that we have a foundry create the original chips, the difference here is that they are producing the same standardized chip for everyone which would allow any foundry to make compatible alternatives.

lofaszvanitt 3y ago
Yeah, we know this way. It's as convoluted and deliberately complex as building a nuclear plant.