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>Actually if the IC design tools would be FOSS, the cost of new designs would decrease considerably, even up to two times. There are FOSS IC design tools but n

>Actually if the IC design tools would be FOSS, the cost of new designs would decrease considerably, even up to two times. There are FOSS IC design tools but nothing that can match Synopsis, Mentor and Cadence and the semi industry isn't gonna start dealing with FOSS jank and destroy their productivity and competitiveness just to save a few milion in licensing costs to those 3 companies, which are peanuts in the end. They're like the John Deer of semi tools, expensive to own and run, but necessary to be competitive and get the most out of this field. Plus, the proprietary stuff is still the standard-cell libraries of TSMC, Samsung, Glo-Fo etc. They will never open source this. >and this perpetuates their monopoly and their ability of extracting huge amounts of money with minimal software development work, Oh, you mean just like Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc?

adrian_b 3y ago
At least Microsoft, Google, Apple etc. do not demand (yet) hundreds of thousands of $ per year for a single license.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >At least Microsoft, Google, Apple etc. do not demand (yet) hundreds of thousands of $ per year for a single license. Because they sell ads and monetize their users instead, which is a pipe of infinite money. Why does it matter to you how much they're charging? It's not communism. It's their honest labor and they're allowed to charge as much as they want for it, same how you're allowed to ask for as much money as you want for your salary negotiations. So please excuse traditional engineering companies for trying to make a living by monetizing their hard earned IP like every single company out there, and not selling ads like big-tech. The world still needs traditional engineering companies to exist to progress, we can't have a society where everyone only works by selling ads to one another. If you feel like they're price gouging, then feel free to write your own EDA tools and sell them for cheap, I'm sure the market is open to paying much less and saving some money.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    Like I have already said, there is no shortage of people who could write better EDA tools, but none of them can obtain the information needed to make them compatible with e.g. TSMC, despite the fact that one would think that it is in the interest of a foundry to provide the information that would be needed to enable the appearance of new customers. However most foundries, like too many other businesses today, are not interested in new customers, unless they already are very big companies, which is one of the factors that has resulted in the extraordinary reduction in the number of companies that compete in every field, in comparison with the situation from a couple of decades ago.

adrian_b 3y ago

At least Microsoft, Google, Apple etc. do not demand (yet) hundreds of thousands of $ per year for a single license.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>At least Microsoft, Google, Apple etc. do not demand (yet) hundreds of thousands of $ per year for a single license. Because they sell ads and monetize their users instead, which is a pipe of infinite money. Why does it matter to you how much they're charging? It's not communism. It's their honest labor and they're allowed to charge as much as they want for it, same how you're allowed to ask for as much money as you want for your salary negotiations. So please excuse traditional engineering companies for trying to make a living by monetizing their hard earned IP like every single company out there, and not selling ads like big-tech. The world still needs traditional engineering companies to exist to progress, we can't have a society where everyone only works by selling ads to one another. If you feel like they're price gouging, then feel free to write your own EDA tools and sell them for cheap, I'm sure the market is open to paying much less and saving some money.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  Like I have already said, there is no shortage of people who could write better EDA tools, but none of them can obtain the information needed to make them compatible with e.g. TSMC, despite the fact that one would think that it is in the interest of a foundry to provide the information that would be needed to enable the appearance of new customers. However most foundries, like too many other businesses today, are not interested in new customers, unless they already are very big companies, which is one of the factors that has resulted in the extraordinary reduction in the number of companies that compete in every field, in comparison with the situation from a couple of decades ago.