7 ms·

Efabless – Shutdown Notice

161 points by KenoFischer 2y ago

fourier54 2y ago
Totally expected. No business model at all. Miracle it worked for so many years.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  The secret ingredient was probably government money.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
We really need a silicon foundry model again, somewhere somehow, where folks can get experienced deigning chips. America's such a technology hub because of our silicon foundry, because of MOSIS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSIS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSIS Carver Mead & Lynn Conway got countless students & interested parties out there, making chips. Introduction to VLSI Design was a book, but also a whole practice of getting out there and doing the thing for real. So so so much innovation & creativity followed. Efabless felt like such a great hope that the tradition could continue, that maybe perhaps we could have a new age of newcomers also starting to make chips.
- ForTheKidz 2y ago
  RIP Lynn Conway. Huge loss to the industry. I hadn't realized she had passed until now.
- throwaway_3133 2y ago
  [dead]
- throwaway3572 2y ago
  It’s still possible to get a chip made, via MPW, from SkyWater. And you can still use all the open source stuff, like the eFabless pad frame, if you want. But you’ll have to work with SkyWater directly which does require various business agreements to be in place. See more here: https://www.skywatertechnology.com/technology-and-design-enablement/mpw-programs/ https://www.skywatertechnology.com/technology-and-design-ena...
  - 15155 2y ago
    > require various business agreements to be in place. I assume they require an NDA for their PDK? Or can projects still be meaningfully open-source with the existing one?
    - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
      SkyWater's 130nm has been used for all (most?) of the Efabless × Google MPW (multi project wafer) runs. That PDK was open sourced as part of that initial effort. https://www.skywatertechnology.com/first-google-sponsored-mpw-shuttle-launched-at-skywater-with-40-open-source-community-submitted-designs/ https://www.skywatertechnology.com/first-google-sponsored-mp... https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk There's a bunch of other PDKs running around now too. But progress does seem to have distinctly tapered off.
      - kragen 2y ago
        A bunch? I've only seen three—but that's still a huge improvement over zero pre-Skywater.
    - pclmulqdq 2y ago
      Most PDKs have an NDA, but Skywater is an exception. Also, most PDKs have some software restrictions on their standard cells because they never tested them with the open-source tools, but with difficulty you can use their design rules in software like MAGIC.
  - bgnn 2y ago
- immibis 2y ago
  China has one, apparently.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  MOSIS still exists, and Skywater has an MPW service that's easy to order from. If you know the right person, TSMC also has an MPW service (as do most other foundries). Most of the slots on these services go toward high-volume customers and universities, especially at the high-tech PDKs. https://themosisservice.com/ https://themosisservice.com/
throwaway_3133 2y ago
This is what happens when you advertise a shuttle run for "open source" designs, brazenly backdoor everybody's chips with a Management Engine (google "eFabless Caravel") and then, to top it all off, act like you can just show up at CCC and pretend everything is fine: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-the-design-decisions-behind-the-first-open-everything-fabulous-fpga#t=1937 https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-the-design-decisions-behind-the-... Video from 38c3 talk 2024-Dec-29; question at time 31min:17sec. This company, and its enablers (formerly) at Google, set back the progress of open source chip design by at least three full years with this bait-and-switch insanity. The people who could see through the ruse wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole; meanwhile it sucked up all the students, momentum, and funding. Think about what three years of progress is worth in the tech industry.
- kragen 2y ago
  How would you do a multi-project chip without something like a "management engine"? By the nature of semiconductor fabrication, you have a bunch of identical chips, but you want each contributor to the chip to be able to use it for testing their own contribution. It seems like that means you need some way to dynamically configure which of the many projects on the chip are actually connected to its I/O pins? To clarify, since unfortunately griefers are flagging your comment to impede the discussion, so I'm not allowed to reply to it: Tiny Tapeout is a multi-project chip, not a multi-project wafer (though it is one chip in a multi-project wafer). Typical minimum die sizes are 0.8mm², which is about 2 million potential transistors in 130nm processes. That's big enough to put many projects on a chip. That's why Tiny Tapeout cost US$300 while MPW prices start at about US$3000 and more typically US$9999+.
  - throwaway_3133 2y ago
    It's a multi-project wafer not a multi-project chip. They cut the wafer apart into individual chips. There is one project on each chip. This has been going on since the 1970s. It is a very well-understood process.
    - throwaway_3133 2y ago
sgnelson 2y ago
That's a real shame. I haven't paid that much attention, but in my utopia, they would have received some funding from the CHIPS act just to act as a gateway for educating people on how to design and make chips. But we live here.
kragen 2y ago
These were the Tiny Tapeout folks, right? Or am I confusing two different things? https://tinytapeout.com/ https://tinytapeout.com/ doesn't have any shutdown notices. Looks like yes: https://store.efabless.com/products/tiny-tapeout-project https://store.efabless.com/products/tiny-tapeout-project KenoFischer says no, Tiny Tapeout was using eFabless as their service provider and is looking into alternatives. Something's fishy. https://efabless.com/news https://efabless.com/news doesn't list any shutdown notices.
- KenoFischer 2y ago
  My understanding is that the TinyTapeout people were using efabless as a service provider and efabless was also providing some sponsorship, but that they are institutionally distinct. There's a LinkedIn post from the TinyTapeout folks that they're looking into alternatives.
  - kragen 2y ago
    That's a relief! And Tiny Tapeout has already done a beta with IHP's open-source 130nm BiCMOS SiGe PDK. The IHP PDK is really a lot more exciting to me than the Skywater stuff because it's aimed at submillimeter analog things (450GHz fₜ, 650GHz fastest oscillator) and why would you fab a digital design in 130nm instead of just programming an FPGA?
    - bgnn 2y ago
      IHP is excitinybut their PDK is horrible compared to major fabs like TSMC or GF. Anyone using it for products hate it.
      - kragen 2y ago
        Hmm, that's interesting. What are the major pain points? As you can probably guess, I don't have access to TSMC's or GF's PDKs.
        2y ago
kiwih 2y ago
I am devastated by this news. I was lucky enough to work with Mohamed and Andy for several projects (including taping out the world's first ChatGPT-authored silicon [0]), and I've never met people more passionate about making chip design and silicon tape-out accessible to all. This is a real loss for the academic and maker communities. [0] https://cyber.nyu.edu/2024/07/22/chipchat-nyu-tandon-team-fabricates-the-worlds-first-chip-designed-through-ai-conversations/ https://cyber.nyu.edu/2024/07/22/chipchat-nyu-tandon-team-fa...
- moralestapia 2y ago
  [flagged]
mysterymath 2y ago
There's something very hinky about this post. It links to efabless.com/notice, not efabless.com direcly, and there's no information about this on efabless.com proper. The title of the notice page is also "Website Title". Not to don my tinfoil hat prematurely, but might this be an attack on efabless's web hosting?
- KenoFischer 2y ago
  It's linked from the main website if you hit the "Log In" button and there was communication to customers about this, though I had the same initial reaction, which is why I looked around for corroboration before posting this.
  - mysterymath 2y ago
    Ah thanks, that's what I was looking for.
- notthetup 2y ago
  Looks legit. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tinytapeout_were-very-sad-to-hear-that-efabless-corporation-activity-7301638170297720832-n7Ru/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tinytapeout_were-very-sad-to-...
chrsw 2y ago
Oof. I'm not totally surprised but this is such a shame. We talk about how we want to bring more of this industry back to the US and then this news drops. Our priorities still aren't right.
- genewitch 2y ago
  how much does a 130nm fab cost? I think 45 and 65 would be better, but ideally the fab could create 6502 and "486" CPUs as well, as those will always be in high demand.
  - nickelpro 2y ago
    It's ~$20k to get on an MPW, for 65 you can double that. If you're talking about how much it takes to build the fab: infinity dollars, nobody builds new fabs in these nodes anymore. Skywater is barely keeping its head above water as-is and that's mostly wafer services, not tapeouts.
    - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
      "3nm Chip Fab: $15-$20 Billion" Not infinity, so time to start saving up... lol =3
      - starspangled 2y ago
        TSMC, Samsung, or Intel might be able to build a 3nm fab for about that price (maybe it's more like $30 billion though). You or I? No.
        Joel_Mckay 2y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYcopzJ-T9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYcopzJ-T9w Focused ion beam milling and electron microscopy machine is under $5m, but your fab output volume for pre-doped CMOS epitaxial grown core-stack wafers would never offset the capital investment. This is a very real machine, and no I don't have one available at this time. Probably it is for the greater good. lol =3
jbkkdoyle33 2y ago
interesting to try Grok an LLAMA instead of ChatGPT for AI generated chips not trying to compete to win jeopardy and politics. For simple digital designs the simulators are generally adequate and the bandwidth of the existing tinychips and test boards dont provide significant speed advantages. Good learning and teaching students, but not far enough along for practical product design and development. Also compare to deepseek?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
gchadwick 2y ago
Very sad to see Efabless go. They really did offer something unique with their chipIgnite programme. It provided a simple way to get a chip made at very low cost ($10k) with no barriers. Thanks to the open source toolchain and PDK you just needed your verilog and a credit card and you were good to go. Sure it had a bunch of limitations but it was still a very encouraging development in making chip design more accessible. Other low-cost (at least low relative to the huge costs of silicon fabrication) services exist but typically they have little public information and will certainly require proprietary tools and PDKs (which are not cheap and require you to persuade the sales people to talk to you to even find out what these costs are).

161 points by KenoFischer 2y ago

fourier54 2y ago

Totally expected. No business model at all. Miracle it worked for so many years.

pclmulqdq 2y ago
The secret ingredient was probably government money.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

We really need a silicon foundry model again, somewhere somehow, where folks can get experienced deigning chips. America's such a technology hub because of our silicon foundry, because of MOSIS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSIS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSIS Carver Mead & Lynn Conway got countless students & interested parties out there, making chips. Introduction to VLSI Design was a book, but also a whole practice of getting out there and doing the thing for real. So so so much innovation & creativity followed. Efabless felt like such a great hope that the tradition could continue, that maybe perhaps we could have a new age of newcomers also starting to make chips.

ForTheKidz 2y ago
RIP Lynn Conway. Huge loss to the industry. I hadn't realized she had passed until now.
throwaway_3133 2y ago
[dead]
throwaway3572 2y ago
It’s still possible to get a chip made, via MPW, from SkyWater. And you can still use all the open source stuff, like the eFabless pad frame, if you want. But you’ll have to work with SkyWater directly which does require various business agreements to be in place. See more here: https://www.skywatertechnology.com/technology-and-design-enablement/mpw-programs/ https://www.skywatertechnology.com/technology-and-design-ena...
- 15155 2y ago
  > require various business agreements to be in place. I assume they require an NDA for their PDK? Or can projects still be meaningfully open-source with the existing one?
  - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
    SkyWater's 130nm has been used for all (most?) of the Efabless × Google MPW (multi project wafer) runs. That PDK was open sourced as part of that initial effort. https://www.skywatertechnology.com/first-google-sponsored-mpw-shuttle-launched-at-skywater-with-40-open-source-community-submitted-designs/ https://www.skywatertechnology.com/first-google-sponsored-mp... https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk There's a bunch of other PDKs running around now too. But progress does seem to have distinctly tapered off.
    - kragen 2y ago
      A bunch? I've only seen three—but that's still a huge improvement over zero pre-Skywater.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    Most PDKs have an NDA, but Skywater is an exception. Also, most PDKs have some software restrictions on their standard cells because they never tested them with the open-source tools, but with difficulty you can use their design rules in software like MAGIC.
- bgnn 2y ago
immibis 2y ago
China has one, apparently.
pclmulqdq 2y ago
MOSIS still exists, and Skywater has an MPW service that's easy to order from. If you know the right person, TSMC also has an MPW service (as do most other foundries). Most of the slots on these services go toward high-volume customers and universities, especially at the high-tech PDKs. https://themosisservice.com/ https://themosisservice.com/

throwaway_3133 2y ago

This is what happens when you advertise a shuttle run for "open source" designs, brazenly backdoor everybody's chips with a Management Engine (google "eFabless Caravel") and then, to top it all off, act like you can just show up at CCC and pretend everything is fine: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-the-design-decisions-behind-the-first-open-everything-fabulous-fpga#t=1937 https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-the-design-decisions-behind-the-... Video from 38c3 talk 2024-Dec-29; question at time 31min:17sec. This company, and its enablers (formerly) at Google, set back the progress of open source chip design by at least three full years with this bait-and-switch insanity. The people who could see through the ruse wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole; meanwhile it sucked up all the students, momentum, and funding. Think about what three years of progress is worth in the tech industry.

kragen 2y ago
How would you do a multi-project chip without something like a "management engine"? By the nature of semiconductor fabrication, you have a bunch of identical chips, but you want each contributor to the chip to be able to use it for testing their own contribution. It seems like that means you need some way to dynamically configure which of the many projects on the chip are actually connected to its I/O pins? To clarify, since unfortunately griefers are flagging your comment to impede the discussion, so I'm not allowed to reply to it: Tiny Tapeout is a multi-project chip, not a multi-project wafer (though it is one chip in a multi-project wafer). Typical minimum die sizes are 0.8mm², which is about 2 million potential transistors in 130nm processes. That's big enough to put many projects on a chip. That's why Tiny Tapeout cost US$300 while MPW prices start at about US$3000 and more typically US$9999+.
- throwaway_3133 2y ago
  It's a multi-project wafer not a multi-project chip. They cut the wafer apart into individual chips. There is one project on each chip. This has been going on since the 1970s. It is a very well-understood process.
  - throwaway_3133 2y ago

sgnelson 2y ago

That's a real shame. I haven't paid that much attention, but in my utopia, they would have received some funding from the CHIPS act just to act as a gateway for educating people on how to design and make chips. But we live here.

kragen 2y ago

These were the Tiny Tapeout folks, right? Or am I confusing two different things? https://tinytapeout.com/ https://tinytapeout.com/ doesn't have any shutdown notices. Looks like yes: https://store.efabless.com/products/tiny-tapeout-project https://store.efabless.com/products/tiny-tapeout-project KenoFischer says no, Tiny Tapeout was using eFabless as their service provider and is looking into alternatives. Something's fishy. https://efabless.com/news https://efabless.com/news doesn't list any shutdown notices.

KenoFischer 2y ago
My understanding is that the TinyTapeout people were using efabless as a service provider and efabless was also providing some sponsorship, but that they are institutionally distinct. There's a LinkedIn post from the TinyTapeout folks that they're looking into alternatives.
- kragen 2y ago
  That's a relief! And Tiny Tapeout has already done a beta with IHP's open-source 130nm BiCMOS SiGe PDK. The IHP PDK is really a lot more exciting to me than the Skywater stuff because it's aimed at submillimeter analog things (450GHz fₜ, 650GHz fastest oscillator) and why would you fab a digital design in 130nm instead of just programming an FPGA?
  - bgnn 2y ago
    IHP is excitinybut their PDK is horrible compared to major fabs like TSMC or GF. Anyone using it for products hate it.
    - kragen 2y ago
      Hmm, that's interesting. What are the major pain points? As you can probably guess, I don't have access to TSMC's or GF's PDKs.
      - 2y ago

kiwih 2y ago

I am devastated by this news. I was lucky enough to work with Mohamed and Andy for several projects (including taping out the world's first ChatGPT-authored silicon [0]), and I've never met people more passionate about making chip design and silicon tape-out accessible to all. This is a real loss for the academic and maker communities. [0] https://cyber.nyu.edu/2024/07/22/chipchat-nyu-tandon-team-fabricates-the-worlds-first-chip-designed-through-ai-conversations/ https://cyber.nyu.edu/2024/07/22/chipchat-nyu-tandon-team-fa...

moralestapia 2y ago
[flagged]

mysterymath 2y ago

There's something very hinky about this post. It links to efabless.com/notice, not efabless.com direcly, and there's no information about this on efabless.com proper. The title of the notice page is also "Website Title". Not to don my tinfoil hat prematurely, but might this be an attack on efabless's web hosting?

KenoFischer 2y ago
It's linked from the main website if you hit the "Log In" button and there was communication to customers about this, though I had the same initial reaction, which is why I looked around for corroboration before posting this.
- mysterymath 2y ago
  Ah thanks, that's what I was looking for.
notthetup 2y ago
Looks legit. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tinytapeout_were-very-sad-to-hear-that-efabless-corporation-activity-7301638170297720832-n7Ru/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tinytapeout_were-very-sad-to-...

chrsw 2y ago

Oof. I'm not totally surprised but this is such a shame. We talk about how we want to bring more of this industry back to the US and then this news drops. Our priorities still aren't right.

genewitch 2y ago
how much does a 130nm fab cost? I think 45 and 65 would be better, but ideally the fab could create 6502 and "486" CPUs as well, as those will always be in high demand.
- nickelpro 2y ago
  It's ~$20k to get on an MPW, for 65 you can double that. If you're talking about how much it takes to build the fab: infinity dollars, nobody builds new fabs in these nodes anymore. Skywater is barely keeping its head above water as-is and that's mostly wafer services, not tapeouts.
  - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
    "3nm Chip Fab: $15-$20 Billion" Not infinity, so time to start saving up... lol =3
    - starspangled 2y ago
      TSMC, Samsung, or Intel might be able to build a 3nm fab for about that price (maybe it's more like $30 billion though). You or I? No.
      - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYcopzJ-T9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYcopzJ-T9w Focused ion beam milling and electron microscopy machine is under $5m, but your fab output volume for pre-doped CMOS epitaxial grown core-stack wafers would never offset the capital investment. This is a very real machine, and no I don't have one available at this time. Probably it is for the greater good. lol =3

jbkkdoyle33 2y ago

interesting to try Grok an LLAMA instead of ChatGPT for AI generated chips not trying to compete to win jeopardy and politics. For simple digital designs the simulators are generally adequate and the bandwidth of the existing tinychips and test boards dont provide significant speed advantages. Good learning and teaching students, but not far enough along for practical product design and development. Also compare to deepseek?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

gchadwick 2y ago

Very sad to see Efabless go. They really did offer something unique with their chipIgnite programme. It provided a simple way to get a chip made at very low cost ($10k) with no barriers. Thanks to the open source toolchain and PDK you just needed your verilog and a credit card and you were good to go. Sure it had a bunch of limitations but it was still a very encouraging development in making chip design more accessible. Other low-cost (at least low relative to the huge costs of silicon fabrication) services exist but typically they have little public information and will certainly require proprietary tools and PDKs (which are not cheap and require you to persuade the sales people to talk to you to even find out what these costs are).