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

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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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Lagg on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:41AM (1 child)

    by Lagg (105) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:41AM (#1017477) Homepage Journal

    There can still be a deep financial incentive for a company that sees the writing on the wall to make fab domestic and make themselves appealing [skywatertechnology.com] so they can use the machines they would have to keep spinning anyway to get free PR points. It seems kind of logical for an ad company to advertise in this indirect way.

    Low batches of not-really-dense wafers (god I hope I'm using the terms right here, I don't know fab science lower than opcode layer very well) on surface area that doesn't back up their production line would seem to be quite an easy project for a company that has as many apparently-competent engineers as Skywater does.

    Goog is in dire need of "don't be evil" points and both them and Skywater are parasites. So ultimately the idea might be to entrench themselves and Skywater as the "domestic chip fab guys who also did that cool thing for those projects! And it's google too!".

    It's like, the guy above you eating popcorn and farting giving you a fresh candy bar in exchange for being quiet about it.

    I'm sure if you asked plenty of people though, this is exactly what a good company would do for its shareholders.

    I myself hold no opinion. Because I'm okay with being able to study the bare metal layer to an academic extent. And the PDKs will be conducive towards it. Google is an ad and software company (in that order). So it's entirely possible the grand goal here is a guy in management going "Okay I'm sick of the chinese and japanese having us by the balls. I just want to ship our bloated out crap to Android HEAD already. Let's move this domestic and have reliable uninfected firmware while we're at it and get some PR".

    I'm sure the ties that Goog management wear are atrocious. And the place is filthy with MBAs. There might be a spectrum of evil there. Especially the ties. Have you ever seen the google campus souvenir shops?

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by DECbot on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:22PM

    by DECbot (832) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:22PM (#1017776) Journal

    I worked in a chip fab about a decade ago--it was more expensive to idle or shutdown the equipment that to keep it running. On any piece of equipment, if it was down for any length of time (measured in hours), it took about half a week to get it to run stable enough and most importantly, clean enough to go back to processing product again. There were many times that equipment when down for maintenance for a routine tube change (typically 12-hours PM), cycle through verification runs and maintenance/troubleshooting for a week or two before going down again for a second tube change before going back into production.
     
    It could be Google/skywater have identified this trend and since the profitable product demand is low, in order to keep the equipment running without dumping product onto the market, they are opting to donate some of their production capacity to open source chip makers.
     
    The second possibility, LPCVD furnaces will run with dummy wafers on the top and bottom of the boat to keep the same number of wafers in the process chamber for each batch in order to maintain the same surface area and thermal properties. These dummy wafers are necessary as the diffusion across these sacrificial wafers are not always uniform. Also, if the batch is for 75 wafers, but the boat holds 150 wafers, fillers are added to fill the boat. Perhaps some passionate engineer convinced some PHB that the boats could be filled with open source wafers, thus getting some productive use out of the fillers besides the process requirements. This would also reduce the thermal cycling of the designated filler wafers--those do have limit of how many times they can be processed before they start breaking in half and causing all sorts of troubles. Donating wafers for open source chips would extend the life of the fillers and dummy wafers, perhaps identify new designer talent, encourage designers to share with google novel new circuits, and as a bonus provide "unlike the other guys, Google isn't evil" PR.

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