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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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Google Will Fab Your Chips for Free
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
When God saw how faulty was man He tried again and made woman. As to
why he then stopped there are two opinions. One of them is woman's.
-- DeGourmont
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DECbot on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:22PM
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.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base