Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
I&#x27;ve spent some time in the chip industry. It is awful, backwards, and super far behind. I didn&#x27;t appreciate the full power of open source until I saw an industry that operates without it.<p>Want a linter for your project? That&#x27;s going to be $50k. Also, it&#x27;s an absolutely terrible linter by software standards. In software, linters combine the best ideas from thousands of engineers across dozens of companies building on each other&#x27;s ideas over multiple decades. In hardware, linters combine the best ideas of a single team, because everything is closed and proprietary and your own special &#x27;secret sauce&#x27;.<p>In software, I can import things for free like nginx and mysql and we have insanely complex compilers like llvm that are completely free. In hardware, the equivalent libraries are both 1-2 orders of magnitude less sophisticated (a disadvantage of everyone absolutely refusing to share knowledge with each other and let other people build on your own ideas for free), and also are going to cost you 6+ figures for anything remotely involved.<p>Hardware is in the stone age of sophistication, and it entirely boils down to the  fact that people don&#x27;t work together to make bigger, more sophisticated projects. Genuinely would not surprise me if a strong open source community could push the capabilities of a 130nm stack beyond what many 7nm projects are capable of, simply because of the knowledge gap that would start to develop between the open and closed world.