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Google Will Fab Your Chips for Free

posted by Fnord666 on Monday July 06 2020, @11:46PM   
from the free-as-in-beer dept.

looorg writes:

Google is offering to produce free chips for you. They have to be open source, they are using 20 year old technology and you'll get 100 of them. Could someone reverse engineer a SID-chip and have Goggle start to crank those suckers out?

https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/03/open_chip_hardware/
https://fossi-foundation.org/2020/06/30/skywater-pdk

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Original Submission

• How about an FPGA? How about an FPGA? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @11:55PM (3 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @11:55PM (#1017400)

  There are two issues:

  Patents, what has expired?

  SW, the part would not be much use if there was nothing to make a load for it.

  Maybe a good performance Arduino processor with gates, flops, and sram on the side.

• Re:How about an FPGA? (Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:31AM

  by driverless (4770) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:31AM (#1017428)

  That was my immediate reaction as well: A very limited custom ASIC using 20-year-old tech or anything you want using a current FPGA. I guess it's neat for student assignments but I can't see what else you'd do with the capability.

  Parent

• Re:How about an FPGA? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @06:22AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @06:22AM (#1017518)

  The basic FPGA patents have expired, though as always, much of all the other circuitry remains a patent minefield. Timeline, 20 years ago would place you around the Virtex-E - Virtex II days (Xilinx) so don't expect too much computationally.

  Parent

• Re:How about an FPGA? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @10:55AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @10:55AM (#1018136)

  20 years for tech patents is way too long. A petition to reduce tech patent lengths is in order.

  Parent