Tech’s Next Revolution Might Be Open Source Semiconductors
Open source semiconductors is such a broad area, and sadly only a tiny spec of it is open source: The HDL code that describes the digital circuit.<p>Everything else is <i>very</i> experimental at best. These days the FOSS FPGA tools are finally getting some traction, with Yosys and Nextpnr. But AsicOne tried to make an ASIC with open source, and faced endless troubles.<p>For ASIC there is basically QFlow, which is quite old, but used successfully to tape out a chip in the past, and there is OpenRoads, which is very new, experimental and ambitious. There are still major gaps in these tools, so in the end you inevitably have to sign an NDA and use proprietary tools and libraries.<p>And that&#x27;s just talking about DIGITAL semiconductors where you compile HDL to pretty much generate the transistors from foundry cell libraries. So you have to sign an NDA to get the cell library, but you can at least release your code.<p>For analog chips, you can&#x27;t do anything. An analog design highly depends on the parameters of the transistors you use, so before you even BEGIN designing, you have to sign an NDA to get the transistor models and you can NEVER open source an analog design.<p>The small dot of light at the end of the tunnel are projects like Minimal Fab, who make more accessible fabrication lines with open transistor models.<p>The crazy thing is that back in the days there were lambda rules, which were open rules anyone could use to design and model with. But with sub-micron devices, these scalable rules no longer scale, so fabs started producing secret models for their specific process.<p>I&#x27;m hopeful that after FPGA, and digital ASIC, analog will be next to be revolutionized.